By KEITH SCHNEIDER

New York Times

JUNE 29, 2016 – Alvin Toffler’s prophetic 1970 book, “Future Shock,” sold millions of copies and catapulted the author to international fame. Credit Susan Wood/Getty Images

Alvin Toffler, the celebrated author of “Future Shock,” the first in a trilogy of best-selling books that presciently forecast how people and institutions of the late 20th century would contend with the immense strains and soaring opportunities of accelerating change, died on Monday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 87.

His death was confirmed by his consulting firm, Toffler Associates, based in Reston, Va.

Mr. Toffler was a self-trained social science scholar and successful freelance magazine writer in the mid-1960s when he decided to spend five years studying the underlying causes of a cultural upheaval that he saw overtaking the United States and other developed countries.

The fruit of his research, “Future Shock” (1970), sold millions of copies and was translated into dozens of languages, catapulting Mr. Toffler to international fame. It is still in print.

In the book, in which he synthesized disparate facts from every corner of the globe, he concluded that the convergence of science, capital and communications was producing such swift change that it was creating an entirely new kind of society.

His predictions about the consequences to culture, the family, government and the economy were remarkably accurate. He foresaw the development of cloning, the popularity and influence of personal computers and the invention of the internet, cable television and telecommuting.

“The roaring current of change,” he said, was producing visible and measurable effects in individuals that fractured marriages, overwhelmed families and caused “confusional breakdowns” manifested in rising crime, drug use and social alienation. He saw these phenomena as very human psychological responses to disorientation and proposed that they were challenging the very structures of communities, institutions and nations.

He continued these themes in two successful follow-up books, “The Third Wave” (1980) and “Powershift” (1990), assisted by his wife, Heidi Toffler, who served as a researcher and editor for the trilogy and was a named co-author in subsequent books. She survives him.

Mr. Toffler popularized the phrase “information overload.” His warnings could be bleak, cautioning that people and institutions that failed to keep pace with change would face ruin. But he was generally optimistic. He was among the first authors to recognize that knowledge, not labor and raw materials, would become the most important economic resource of advanced societies.

Critics were not sure what to make of Mr. Toffler’s literary style or scholarship. The mechanical engineering scholar and systems theorist Richard W. Longman wrote in The New York Times that Mr. Toffler “sends flocks of facts and speculation whirling past like birds in a tornado.” In Time magazine, the reviewer R. Z. Sheppard wrote, “Toffler’s redundant delivery and overheated prose turned kernels of truth into puffed generalities.”

Mr. Toffler’s work nevertheless found an eager readership among the general public, on college campuses, in corporate suites and in national governments. Newt Gingrich, the former Republican speaker of the House, met the Tofflers in the 1970s and became close to them. He said “The Third Wave” had immensely influenced his own thinking and was “one of the great seminal works of our time.”

Prime Minister Zhao Ziyang of China convened conferences to discuss “The Third Wave” in the early 1980s, and in 1985 the book was the No. 2 best seller in China. Only the speeches of the Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping sold more copies.

Mr. Toffler was born in New York on Oct. 4, 1928, and raised in Brooklyn, the only son and elder of two children of Sam and Rose Toffler, immigrants from Poland. His father was a furrier.

Alvin began to write poetry and stories soon after learning to read and aspired to be a writer from the time he was 7 years old, he told interviewers. His inspiration, he said, came from an uncle and aunt — Phil Album, an editor, and Ruth Album, a poet — who lived with the Tofflers.

“They were Depression-era literary intellectuals,” Mr. Toffler said in an interview for this obituary in 2006, “and they always talked about exciting ideas.”

Mr. Toffler enrolled in New York University in 1946 and, by his account, spent the next four years only mildly interested in his academic work. He was far more engaged in political activism. In the fall of 1948, during a brief trip home from helping to register black voters in North Carolina, he met Adelaide Elizabeth Farrell, known as Heidi.

“I went to Washington Square,” he said, “and as I walked across the park, I saw a girl in one of my classes. And next to her was a gorgeous blonde. We have been inseparable since.”

Where Mr. Toffler was voluble and visionary, Ms. Toffler was cleareyed and direct. Early in 1950, before they were married, she persuaded him to finish his course work at N.Y.U. and graduate with a degree in English.

“I barely made it,” he recalled. “I paid no attention to credits. In my youthful view I thought, ‘Who needs ceremony?’ Heidi is far more practical.”

Both shared expansive intellects and the passion to make their lives matter. Like the writers he most admired, Mr. Toffler wanted experiences to report on. “Steinbeck went to pick grapes,” he said. “Jack London sailed ships.”

The couple decided to move to Cleveland, then at the very center of industrial America. They were married there on April 29, 1950, by a justice of the peace whom Mr. Toffler described as a “roaring drunk.” They lived on the city’s west side and took production jobs in separate factories.

Mr. Toffler learned to weld and repair machinery and came to understand in the most personal way the toll that physical labor can have on industrial workers. He broke a vertebra when a steel beam he was helping to unload twisted unexpectedly and fell on him.

At night, Mr. Toffler wrote poetry and fiction and discovered he was proficient in neither. But he still aspired to be a writer. In 1954, soon after the birth of the couple’s only child, Karen, he persuaded the editor of Industry and Welding, a national trade magazine published in Cleveland, to hire him as a reporter.

Mr. Toffler recalled: “The editor told me, ‘You’re getting this job because you know how to weld. Now, show me you know how to write.’”

Mr. Toffler soon landed a job as a reporter for Labor’s Daily, a national trade newspaper published in Charleston, W.Va., by the International Typographical Union. It sent him to Washington to cover labor news there in 1957.

Two years later, he sent Fortune magazine a proposal to write an article about the economics of the growing mainstream interest in the arts. Fortune rejected the idea but invited Mr. Toffler to New York for an interview and hired him as its labor editor and columnist.

He left Fortune in 1962 and, with his wife as editor and adviser, began a freelance-writing career covering politics, technology and social science for scholarly journals and writing long interviews for Playboy magazine. His 1964 Playboy interview with the Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov was considered one of the magazine’s best.

Besides his wife, Mr. Toffler is survived by a sister, Caroline Sitter. The Tofflers’ daughter died in 2000.

Mr. Toffler published 13 books and won numerous honors, including a career achievement award in 2005 from the American Society of Journalists and Authors. He and his wife formed Toffler Associates, a global forecasting and consulting company, originally based in Manchester, Mass., in 1996.

In recent years, benefiting from hindsight, some critics said Mr. Toffler had gotten much wrong. Shel Israel, an author and commentator who writes about social media for Forbes, took issue with Mr. Toffler in 2012 for painting “a picture of people who were isolated and depressed, cut off from human intimacy by a relentless fire hose of messages and data barraging us.”

But, he added: “We are not isolated by it. And when the information overloads us, most people are still wise enough to use the power of the ‘Off’ button to gain some peace.”

In writing “Future Shock” 46 years ago, Mr. Toffler acknowledged that the future he saw coming might ultimately differ in the details from what actually came to pass.

“No serious futurist deals in ‘predictions,’” he wrote in the book’s introduction. “These are left for television oracles and newspaper astrologers.”

He advised readers to “concern themselves more and more with general theme, rather than detail.” That theme, he emphasized, was that “the rate of change has implications quite apart from, and sometimes more important than, the directions of change.”

He added, “We who explore the future are like those ancient mapmakers, and it is in this spirit that the concept of future shock and the theory of the adaptive range are presented here — not as final word, but as a first approximation of the new realities, filled with danger and promise, created by the accelerative thrust.”

By David Szondy

Gizmag

June 22, 2016 – In 2014, Rolls-Royce unveiled its vision of the robotic cargo ship of the future that it believes will become a reality by 2020. This week at the Autonomous Ship Technology Symposium 2016 in Amsterdam, the Rolls-Royce-led Advanced Autonomous Waterborne Applications initiative (AAWA) presented a white paper outlining what such autonomous vessels might be like and what hurdles stand between them and the open sea.

According to Rolls-Royce, the ships of the future will have as much in common with the ships of today as the Santa Maria has with HMS Queen Elizabeth. Without human crews, autonomous ships would operate under computer control aided by shore operators. The giant cargo vessels would look like surfaced whales with smooth decks (if they have decks) and no superstructures. They would also be eerily quiet as they glide along the sea lanes using eco-friendly engines.

How to get to this tomorrow is the topic of the AAWA white paper (PDF) developed by Rolls-Royce in conjunction with a consortium of partners, including Finferries, ESL Shipping, Tampere University of Technology, and Brighthouse Intelligence. Part of a €6.6 million (US$7.48 million) project that runs through 2017, it identifies the areas that need to be addressed and the problems that will need to be solved to create such ships, the business case for them, and how they might be integrated into conventional shipping.

One key point of the white paper is that there is no one-size-fits all solution to making an autonomous ship and nobody is going to just slap a black box on the bridge of an existing ship and hit the Go button. Such ships will appear gradually as the technology develops and, like many cloud-based systems, autonomous ships will need time to create a large database to draw from as many types of ships for many missions are built.

An element that all of these ships will have in common, according to the paper, is that they will be computer controlled with arrays of sensors that will include cameras, infrared systems, radar, lidar, microphones, sonar, and GPS. However, the tricky bit will be figuring out how to deal with all the bandwidth these require and whether they can operate in real time.

This is just one problem that would need to be solved, but AAWA says that the advantages of such ships would be potentially immense. Ships could be built without the need for crew quarters, deckhouse, lifeboats, or even decks. They would be much cheaper to build and operate and would carry more cargo. Ship design would be more flexible, human errors would be reduced, and the new technologies would provide new, disruptive business opportunities similar to those of Uber and Spotify in their fields.

A remote engineer handles a propulsion problem

Central to the autonomous ships would be their ability to make decisions in what the paper calls "adjustable" or "dynamic" autonomy. That is, there are many levels of autonomy, from the lowest where the computer does nothing but follow human orders, to the highest where the computer won’t even listen to humans. The ships would be programmed to select the level of autonomy suitable to the task at hand.

Most of the time, the ship is completely autonomous, such as on the high seas, and if something happens, the computer can either make its own corrections without human intervention, ask for human approval, or turn over complete control as appropriate. It’s an area where the paper says the technology is already well developed thanks to autonomous cars, aviation drones, and robotics.

The paper even foresees a time when a robotic ship will be able to coordinate directly with other ships in the area. Eventually, the ships will develop the ability to learn from their own experiences and that of other ships to improve performance.

But as situations become more complicated and ambiguous, even the most advanced machine will require human intervention. Weather and other conditions can change suddenly and unpredictably, equipment can break down, and the computer’s programming can be overwhelmed or even deliberately attacked. In these situations, it needs the ability to revert to default and fallback positions in the event of a communications failure, with responses ranging from wait for recontact to head for a designated safe area.

The main backup for the autonomous ship would be a series of shore-based control centers linked to the ship by satellite and land-based communications. These communications would need to be bidirectional, accurate, scalable, and supported by multiple systems for redundancy and minimal risk. The operators at these stations would be able to monitor several ships at any one time, identify and correct problems in real time, act as direct contacts with human skippers as needed, and collaborate remotely on problems.

As to human crews, the ideal towards which Rolls-Royce is aiming is a ship with no need of one, but in the short and medium term, deckhands of flesh and blood will still play a part. At first, they may be required for legal reasons or at the insistence of insurance firms to sit about acting as emergency standby sailors or to help in dealing with conventional ships and skippers until standard practices are established. It’s expected that humans will be needed in ports for longer, to ensure that cargos are properly secured.

Collaborative tables would allow operators to solve problems on remote robotic ships

Then there are the legal headaches of robotic ships. Is an autonomous ship legally a ship? Who is liable in the event of an accident? How must they conform to regulations or should the regulations be rewritten? What about in emergencies? Since robotic ships can’t provide aid to distressed vessels directly, will it be enough for them to help with their superior sensors to guide and direct rescue vessels?

To answer these questions and to develop the technical, legal, and safety specifications, AAWA is aiming for a proof of concept demonstrator by the end of next year. In addition, it is working on simulators, and is testing different sensor technologies onboard the FinFerries vessel Stella, which runs between Korpo and Houtskär in Finland.

"This is happening. It’s not if, it’s when," says Oskar Levander, Rolls-Royce, Vice President of Innovation. "The technologies needed to make remote and autonomous ships a reality exist. The AAWA project is testing sensor arrays in a range of operating and climatic conditions in Finland and has created a simulated autonomous ship control system which allows the behaviour of the complete communication system to be explored. We will see a remote controlled ship in commercial use by the end of the decade."

By Ellen Brown

Solidarityeconomy.net via OpEd News

Despite North Dakota’s collapsing oil market, its state-owned bank continues to report record profits. This article looks at what California, with fifty times North Dakota’s population, could do following that state’s lead.

May 3, 2016- In November 2014, the Wall Street Journal reported [1] that the Bank of North Dakota (BND), the nation’s only state-owned depository bank, was more profitable even than J.P. Morgan Chase and Goldman Sachs. The author attributed this remarkable performance to the state’s oil boom; but the boom has now become an oil bust [2], yet the BND’s profits continue to climb. Its 2015 Annual Report [3], published on April 20th, boasted its most profitable year ever.

The BND has had record profits for the last 12 years, each year outperforming the last. In 2015 it reported $130.7 million in earnings, total assets of $7.4 billion, capital of $749 million, and a return on investment of a whopping 18.1 percent. Its lending portfolio grew by $486 million, a 12.7 percent increase, with growth in all four of its areas of concentration: agriculture, business, residential, and student loans.

By increasing its lending into a collapsing economy, the BND has helped prop the economy up. In 2015, it introduced new infrastructure programs to improve access to medical facilities, remodel or construct new schools, and build new road and water infrastructure. The Farm Financial Stability Loan was introduced to assist farmers affected by low commodity prices or below-average crop production. The BND also helped fund 300 new businesses.

Those numbers are particularly impressive considering that North Dakota has a population of only about 750,000, just half the size of Phoenix or Philadelphia. Compare that to California, the largest state by population, which has more than fifty times as many people as North Dakota.

What could California do with its own bank, following North Dakota’s lead? Here are some possibilities, including costs, risks and potential profits.

Getting Started: Forming a Bank Without Cost to the Taxpayers

A bank can be started in California with an initial capitalization of about $20 million. But let’s say the state wants to do something substantial and begins with a capitalization of $1 billion.

Where to get this money? One option would be the state’s own pension funds, which are always seeking good investments. Today state pension funds are looking for a return of about 7% per year [4] (although in practice they are getting less). One billion dollars could be raised more cheaply with a bond issue, but tapping into the state’s own funds would avoid increasing state debt levels.

At a 10% capital requirement, $1 billion in capitalization is sufficient to back $10 billion in new loans, assuming the bank has an equivalent sum in deposits to provide liquidity.

Where to get the deposits? One possibility would be the California Pooled Money Investment Account (PMIA), which contained $67.7 billion earning a modest 0.47% [5] as of the quarter ending March 31, 2016. This huge pool of rainy day, slush and investment funds is invested 47.01% in US Treasuries, 16.33% in certificates of deposit and bank notes, 8.35% in time deposits, and 8.91% in loans, along with some other smaller investments. A portion of this money could be transferred to the state-owned bank as its deposit base, on which 0.5% could be paid in interest, generating the same average return that the PMIA is getting now.

For our hypothetical purposes, let’s say $11.1 billion is transferred from the PMIA and deposited in the state-owned bank. With a 10% reserve requirement, $1.1 billion would need to be held as reserves. The other $10 billion could be lent or invested. What could be done with this $10 billion? Here are some possibilities.

Slashing the Cost of Infrastructure

One option would be to fund critical infrastructure needs. Today California and other states deposit their revenues in Wall Street banks at minimal interest, then finance infrastructure construction and repair by borrowing from the Wall Street bond market at much higher interest. A general rule for government bonds is that they double the cost [6] of projects, once interest is paid. California and other states could save these costs simply by being their own bankers and borrowing from themselves; and with their own chartered banks, they could do it while getting the same safeguards they are getting today with their Wall Street deposits and investments. The money might actually be safer in their own banks, which would not be subject to the bail-in provisions now imposed [7] by the G-20’s Financial Stability Board on giant "systemically risky" banking institutions.

To envision the possibilities, let’s say California decided to fund its new bullet train through its state-owned bank. In 2008, Californians approved a bond issue of $10 billion as the initial outlay for this train, which was to run from Los Angeles to San Francisco. At then-existing interest rates, estimates were that by the time the bonds were paid off, California taxpayers would have paid an additional $9.5 billion in interest [8].

So let’s assume the $10 billion in available assets from the state-owned bank were used to repurchase these bonds. The state would have saved $9.5 billion, less the cost of funds.

It is not clear from the above-cited source what the length of the bond issue was, but assume it was for 20 years, making the interest rate about 3.5%. The cost of one billion dollars in capital for 20 years at 7% would be $2.87 billion, and the cost of $11.1 billion in deposits at 0.5% would be $1.164 billion. So the total cost of funds would be $4.034 billion. Deducted from $9.5 billion, that leaves about $5.5 billion in savings or profit over 20 years. That’s $5.5 billion generated with money the state already has sitting idle, requiring no additional borrowing or taxpayer funds.

What about risk? What if one of the cities or state agencies whose money is held in the investment pool wants to pull that money out? Since it is held in the bank as deposits, it would be immediately liquid and available, as all deposits are. And if the bank then lacked sufficient liquidity to back its assets (in this case the repurchase of its own bonds), it could in the short term do as all banks do — borrow from other banks at the Fed funds rate of about 0.35%, or from the Federal Reserve Discount Window at about 0.75%. Better yet, it could simply liquidate some of the $56 billion remaining in the PMIA and deposit that money into its state bank, where the funds would continue to earn 0.5% interest as they are doing now.

Assume that from its $5.5 billion in profits, the bank then repaid the pension funds their $1 billion initial capital investment. That would leave $4.5 billion in profit, free and clear — a tidy sum potentially generated by one man sitting in an office shuffling computer entries, without new buildings, tellers, loan officers or other overhead. That capital base would be sufficient to capitalize about $40 billion in new loans, all generated without cost to the taxpayers.

A California New Deal

The bullet train example is a simple way to illustrate the potential of a state-owned bank, but there are many other possibilities for using its available assets. As the BND did after building up its capital base, the bank could advance loans at reasonable rates for local businesses, homeowners, students, school districts, and municipalities seeking funds for infrastructure.

These loans would be somewhat riskier than buying back the state’s own bonds, and they would involve variable time frames. Like all banks, the state bank could run into liquidity problems from borrowing short to lend long, should the depositors unexpectedly come for their money. But again, that problem could be fixed simply by liquidating some portion of the money remaining in the PMIA and depositing it in the state-owned bank, where it would earn the same 0.5% interest it is earning now.

Here is another intriguing possibility for avoiding liquidity problems. The bank could serve simply as intermediator, generating loans which would then be sold to investors. That is what banks do today when they securitize mortgages and sell them off. Risk of loss is imposed on the investors, who also get the payment stream; but the bank profits as well, by receiving fees for its intermediating functions.

The federally-owned Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) did something similar when it funded a major portion of the New Deal and World War II by selling bonds. This money was then used for loans to build infrastructure of every sort and to finance the war. According to a US Treasury report titled Final Report of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation [9] (Government Printing Office, 1959), the RFC loaned or invested more than $40 billion from 1932 to 1957 (the years of its operation). By some estimates, the sum was about $50 billion. A small part of this came from its initial capitalization. The rest was borrowed — $51.3 billion from the US Treasury and $3.1 billion from the public. The RFC financed roads, bridges, dams, post offices, universities, electrical power, mortgages, farms, and much more, while at the same time making money for the government. On its normal lending functions (omitting such things as extraordinary grants for wartime), it wound up earning a total net income of $690 million.

North Dakota has led the way in demonstrating how a state can jump-start a flagging economy by keeping its revenues in its own state-owned bank, using them to generate credit for the state and its citizens, bypassing the tourniquet on the free flow of credit imposed by private out-of-state banks. California and other states could do the same. They could create jobs, restore home ownership, rebuild infrastructure and generally stimulate their economies, while generating hefty dividends for the state, without increasing debt levels or risking public funds — and without costing taxpayers a dime.

[Ellen Brown is an attorney, founder of the Public Banking Institute, and author of twelve books including the best-selling Web of Debt. In the Public Bank Solution, her latest book, she explores successful public banking models historically and globally. Her websites are http://EllenBrown.com [10], http://PublicBankSolution.com [11], and http://PublicBankingInstitute.org [12]. ]

Thanks to the author for sending this to Portside.

Source URL: https://portside.org/2016-05-27/look-bank-north-dakota-it-soars-despite-oil-bust

Links:
[1] http://www.wsj.com/articles/shale-boom-helps-north-dakota-bank-earn-returns-goldman-would-envy-1416180862
[2] http://www.kare11.com/news/from-boom-to-bust-big-changes-in-nd-oil/156422333
[3] https://bnd.nd.gov/2015-annual-report/
[4] http://www.wsj.com/articles/taxpayers-more-pension-burdens-headed-your-way-1441388090
[5] http://www.treasurer.ca.gov/pmia-laif/performance/PMIA-LAIF_perform.pdf
[6] http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_24795356/delta-tunnels-plans-true-price-tag-much-67
[7] http://www.globalresearch.ca/new-g20-financial-rules-cyprus-forbidden-bail-ins-to-confiscate-bank-deposits-and-pension-funds/5417351
[8] http://dailynexus.com/2008-09-30/state-to-vote-on-10-billion-train-prop/
[9] https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/scribd/?title_id=134&filepath=/docs/publications/rcf/rfc_19590506_finalreport.pdf#scribd-open
[10] http://EllenBrown.com
[11] http://PublicBankSolution.com
[12] http://PublicBankingInstitute.org

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After nearly a year in development, Dubai unveils an open-plan office constructed using an industrial 3D printer.

By Michelle Starr

CNET

May 25, 2016 – The use of 3D printing in architecture is still small as logistics are being ironed out, but a new proof of concept has just been unveiled. The 250-square-metre space (2,700 square foot) is what Dubai’s Museum of the Future project is calling the world’s first 3D-printed office building. China unveiled the world’s first 3D printed office building and mansion in early 2015.

First announced in June 2015, the new building’s purpose is to showcase the United Arab Emirates’ commitment to innovation and looking to the future, and promote the UAE as a world leader in 3D printing.

"We implement what we plan and we pursue actions not theories. The rapidly changing world requires us to accelerate our pace of development as history does not recognize plans but achievements," Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum said at the grand opening.

A 3D printer was used to print the building in a special cement mixture, layer by layer. In all, it took a total of 17 days to print the building at a cost of about $140,000, after which the interior and exterior design details were added.

One person was employed to monitor the 3D printer. Another seven people took care of the installation of building components on-site, and another 10 electricians and other specialists looked after the engineering. They represented a savings of 50 percent on normal labour costs.

The open plan office will initially house the Dubai Future Foundation temporarily. In addition to providing a workspace, it could also, in the future, be used to host exhibitions, workshops and other events.

By Stu Robarts

Solidarityeconomy.net via Gizmag

May 9, 2016 – The truck can operate fully autonomously both above and below ground.

Not content with its plans to test autonomous cars on public roads in China and the UK, Volvo wants to test self-driving trucks in underground mines too. The Swedish carmaker has developed a fully autonomous construction truck that it says can work without supervision.

The truck has been developed in partnership with Saab-owned tech consultancy Combitech, as part of a research and development project. Member of Volvo’s group executive board and chief technology officer Torbjörn Holmström says such vehicles could improve the productivity of businesses, as they can work round-the-clock without tiring, unlike human drivers.

"The Volvo Group has been conducting research into autonomous vehicles for several years and we are delighted to have already developed a solution that we believe will ultimately revolutionize the mining industry," explains Holmström. "We expect to be able to significantly increase our customers’ productivity while at the same time improving fuel efficiency and safety."

The truck is fitted with GPS technology and LiDAR sensors, which continuously scan its surroundings. Using data from these sources, it is able to navigate fixed and moving obstacles, as well as operate fully autonomously both above and below ground.

The U.S. solar industry has a bright future.

Casey Williams

Editorial Fellow, The Huffington Post

May 5, 2016 – The solar industry is booming. The millionth set of solar panels in the United States was installed sometime in the last two months, and industry leaders expect the number of solar-powered systems to double within two years.

That’s a huge deal, experts say. While solar still only makes up 1 percent of the country’s energy mix, the swift rise in solar capacity portends a bright future for an energy source that, less than 10 years ago, a leading solar tech scientist dismissed as “green bling for the wealthy.”

Just 30,000 residential solar installations dotted the country a decade ago. Since then, the cost of generating power from solar has dropped by over 70 percent. Falling production costs, combined with improvements in electricity storage and a decline in the number of coal-fired power plants, has fueled the industry’s breakneck growth, according to Rhone Resch, president and CEO of the Solar Energy Industries Association.

“The power sector is being turned on its head,” Resch told reporters on Wednesday. “The ones that land on their feet are the ones that figure out how to produce clean energy at scale.”

Most of the solar installations added over the last decade have been residential units like this one. 

The million-installation mark is just the latest milestone reached by the solar industry in recent months. In 2015, for the first time ever, the U.S. added more new energy capacity from solar than from natural gas. And in December, 2015, Congress extended the Solar Investment Tax Credit, which provides generous tax incentives for homeowners and businesses that install solar panels.

The industry’s rapid growth shows no signs of slowing.

“It’s entirely possible that over next five years solar could be single largest new source of electricity in the country,” Shayle Kann, senior vice president of research at GreenTech Media, told reporters.

Solar panels might even be “contagious,” according to one study. In Colorado and Hawaii, solar installations spread rapidly after a few people put them up. This map from SolarCity, the country’s largest solar energy company, shows just how fast this happened in one area of Colorado:

SolarCity

That’s good news for the climate. The energy industry in the U.S. spews more climate-warming greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than any other sector, due to its reliance on fossil fuels. Carbon-free energy sources like solar promise to cut the country’s greenhouse gas emissions and help the U.S. meet carbon reduction goals outlined in the Paris climate deal, which aims to keep planetary warming under 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

But the solar boom isn’t just helping to wean the country off fossil fuels. It could also change the way Americans consume electricity. Unlike traditional power sources, producing electricity from solar doesn’t require people to hook up to a centralized power grid. They can slap panels on their roof and generate power at home. At-home power production could supplement energy from the grid and help people weather blackouts, according to Resch.

While most solar-generated electricity in the U.S. comes from large industrial sources, around 900,000 of the country’s million solar installations are small-scale, residential systems, Resch said. The expansion of home systems represents a major shift in how energy is generated and distributed in the U.S., according to Adam Browning, executive director of the nonprofit Vote Solar.

“For a century we’ve depended on a centralized, monopoly system,” Browning told reporters. “Today, power generation is in the hands of the people.”

Solar Energy Industries Association

As prices have fallen, solar capacity has grown dramatically in the U.S.

Solar is taking off just as the coal industry is tanking. In 2015, coal’s share of energy production in the U.S. dipped below 40 percent for the first time in 30 years. Several major coal producers have filed for bankruptcy in recent months, and dozens of coal plants have shuttered, most recently on Wednesday, when Illinois announced it would close three coal-fired plants in the state.

While the decline of coal means fewer jobs in the industry, solar advocates hope the rapid shift towards solar and other renewable industries will make up for job losses in the fossil fuel sector.

“The transition to renewable energy isn’t going to be just as good as the power system as we’ve enjoyed in the past,” Browning said. “It’s going to be a lot better.”

Michael Franco

Gizmag.com

April 25, 2016 – The new Advanced Manufacturing Works facility is now part of a campus that includes 1.7 million square feet of factories, offices and labs (Credit: GE Power). View gallery (12 images)

It feels like a scene from a movie. I’m standing in the lobby of a brand-new research facility where video screens set in large circular stands beam the company’s achievements from their high-res flat screens. Behind glass panels, engineers in slacks and button-down shirts are busy working lasers, monitoring a robot and generally doing engineer-like things. This is GE’s brand-new Advanced Manufacturing Works (AMW) in Greenville, South Carolina. It’s the company’s first in the world and Gizmag got inside to take a sneak peek.

The facility cost US$73 million to build, and GE is planning on investing an additional $327 million into the space over the coming years. The goal of the site is to place researchers and designers in close proximity to manufacturers (the AMW is situated right next to a large GE manufacturing plant) to better improve efficiencies through new technologies and technological tweaks. The primary area in which all this tech is focused is on creating giant gas turbines for power plants around the world, although the facility does work on other projects such as wind turbines as well.

There were several key technologies showcased at the AMW grand opening on April 22. Here are a few.

3D Optical Scanner

When you’re working with parts that involve natural gas and the generation of enormous amounts of energy, it’s important to be precise. The 3D optical scanner at the AMW facility helps with that. The machine works by converting a video feed of a machine part into a series of coordinates, which essentially turns it into a computer model of what the part looks like. A color map is then created that highlights the difference between the actual part and its ideal design.

The system can read fluctuations from one-one-thousandth of an inch or less. "We can actually measure a new component, run it in an engine and then measure it again and you can see how it’s changed," says John Lammas, GE’s vice president of power generation.

Laser MicroJet

The blades inside gas turbines need to have tiny holes drilled in them which serve to keep them cool as temperatures climb. Previously, GE workers would drill the holes, coat the blade in a protective ceramic material, and then someone would have to come along and clean the holes out. By using a Laser MicroJet to drill the holes, the company thinks it can eliminate the extra work and also get more precise holes in various shapes to increase the efficiencies of the blades.

The system was spotted by one of GE’s engineers who saw the technology at a trade show in Switzerland where it was being used to cut diamonds. It works by using a hair-thin jet of water to steer a laser beam directly where it needs to go. The water also keeps the cutting process cool and removes debris as the laser bites into the material. According to GE’s Kurt Goodwin, the AMW’s General Manager, the system will eliminate about seven to eight hours of handwork per part when it gets rolled out on the factory floor in September.

"We take a coated part like this that hasn’t been pre-drilled," says Goodwin. "It drills through the coating, gets feedback from the change in energy, resets the laser, keeps going through the metal, and then when it comes out through the back of the metal, it stops itself so it doesn’t drill on the other side."

Autonomous Robot

No factory of the future would be complete without a free-ranging robot, and GE’s AMW has one of those as well. Goodwin explained that at factories such as those that make automobiles, robots on the assembly line make sense, but in a factory like GE’s, with relatively low output, a robot needs to handle multiple tasks so that it can always stay busy. He compared GE’s AGV (autonomous guided vehicle) to a Roomba vacuum cleaner, meaning that the device maps out the entire factory and can them move autonomously throughout it. There are no set paths for it to roam along; rather, it uses optical and laser sensors to figure out where it needs to go and avoid collisions with its human coworkers and other pieces of machinery.

One of the applications for the robot is to handle parts that can emerge from machines at 500-600 degrees Fahrenheit rather than losing time waiting for the part to cool so that a human can touch it.

3D Printing

It seems that 3D printing is everywhere these days, and the AMW is no exception. The facility has eight machines that it got from several different manufacturers and then altered to suit the needs of the plant. All of the machines print using metal, and they’re used to output parts for machinery at a faster rate than the company was previously capable of. They’re also used to create parts in a brand-new way.

"What we’re getting excited about is some of the geometries you can create with this technology," says GE’s additive manufacturing manager Steven Woods. "You can imagine if you can build something layer-by-layer out of metal, you no longer need line of sight. In traditional manufacturing typically we need line of sight for machine-tooled or laser-popping technology. We no longer need that and now we can do some pretty interesting things with lattice structures and things of that nature."

While checking out the machines at work, I noticed that a bank of them had names like "Storm," "Wolverine" and "Cyclops" on them. I asked Wood about how they came by their X-Men monickers.

"We failed for about four months trying to meet the requirements for our parts when we first got the machines," he says. "So initially, all the machines had villain names. Eventually, as we’ve tamed the beast, they are turning into superhero names."

Not only is the AMW using 3D printing to produce parts from scratch, they’re also using the technology to create molds from sand to cast larger parts that wouldn’t be feasible to 3D print. The technique speeds the testing of new designs from months to weeks.

Internet of Things

While the interconnectivity between machines has made news mostly in the home appliance sector, GE is using it to do more than turn on coffee makers and alert you when the wash is done. It is working on linking up all the machines in its factory so that they can communicate with each other – and with the employees. Already, AMW workers can log into the company’s portal through an double-encryption-guarded VPN tunnel and get the status of any machine in the facility right from their smartphones.

"Whether we’re here or whether we want to have a secure VPN tunnel from our phone inside the facility, we can do it," said GE lead engineer Kenneth Hislop. "So if we’re at home or on vacation, we can see exactly what’s going on."

By Gar Alperovitz

February 11, 2016, The Nation

In 1970, the great liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith declared that the “Democratic Party must henceforth use the word ‘socialism.’ It describes what is needed.” Like many others, however, Galbraith largely dropped the subject in subsequent years. The response to Bernie Sanders’s insurgent presidential campaign, along with polls showing that large numbers of young people and minorities in America have a positive view of socialism, suggest that this once-forbidden concept may no longer be taboo.

More than 40 percent of Americans under the age of 30 view socialism favorably, according to the most recent YouGov poll. Positive responses among black Americans have ranged between 29 and 41 percent in recent surveys. A 2011 Pew Research Center poll that omitted the “undecided” option found that 49 percent of its young participants viewed socialism favorably.

The most obvious source of this sea change is the failure of traditional approaches to address the nation’s most pressing problems: growing inequality, poverty, economic insecurity, global warming, perpetual war, and the decay and violence visited on black communities. Side by side with the increasing concentration of wealth has been the ever more blatant exploitation of the political power that wealth confers on elites and major corporations, most obviously by the Koch brothers and their right-wing allies.

Widespread dissatisfaction with the status quo creates a climate receptive to sweeping change. But such a climate can also devolve into indifference or cynicism if clear alternatives are not presented. With that in mind, how might a practical and politically viable alternative to our current system actually be constructed? What would socialism look like in 21st-century America?

* * *

At the core of the traditional socialist argument has always been the judgment that democratic ownership of the nation’s wealth—and especially what Marx called the “means of production”—is essential. The question of ownership, however, has rarely been mentioned in conventional political debate. The traditional socialist idea of “nationalized industry” is beyond the pale, and the vast majority of progressives have so far avoided discussing alternatives to the statist socialist model.

Despite his self-definition as a democratic socialist, Sanders has offered what is essentially a strong liberal or social-democratic program of progressive taxation, financial regulation, single-payer healthcare, increased Social Security and income-support programs, and environmental regulation. Although he backs worker-owned companies, Sanders explicitly disavowed government ownership of businesses in his major theme-setting speech at Georgetown University last November.

The general argument for democratized ownership has always been much broader than simply capturing profits for social use.

At the same time, new resources have become available to support the construction of a serious alternative system—one that is “socialist” in content and vision, but also highly democratic and accountable in structure. It is a system that could become increasingly viable as Americans’ disillusionment with traditional strategies continues to grow.

In recent years, there has been a steady buildup of interest in new forms of democratized ownership. Worker-owned cooperatives, neighborhood land trusts, and municipal corporations all democratize ownership in one way or another, but they do so in decentralized rather than statist fashion. The trajectory of change is impressive. Examples of successful worker ownership range from Cooperative Home Care Associates in New York City to the Evergreen complex of solar, greenhouse, and laundry cooperatives in Cleveland. Mayors and city councils in places like Austin, Texas; Madison, Wisconsin; Richmond, California; and New York City have started to provide direct financial or technical support for these developments, suggesting a new nexus of political power.

Older forms of worker ownership—most notably employee stock- ownership plans, or ESOPs—leave much to be desired, but they nonetheless offer a similar sense of what a more expansive buildup in democratized ownership might look like. Approximately 7,000 ESOP enterprises exist nationwide, largely owned by about 13.9 million workers (roughly 3.3 million of whom are no longer active). A number of these companies have attempted to combine unions with ESOP ownership. A related approach is being tested in new union/co-op efforts backed by the United Steelworkers.

* * *

Cities have also begun to support other forms of public ownership. Communities as diverse as Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Santa Fe, New Mexico, are working to establish municipally owned banks. In Boulder, Colorado, climate-change activists have triumphed over intense corporate opposition in two major referendum battles to municipalize the local utility. More than 250 community land trusts—a model of city and neighborhood development in which land is socialized to prevent gentrification—have been set up across the country, building on the foundational work done by the Champlain Housing Trust in Burlington, Vermont.

Some 450 communities have also established municipally owned Internet systems, commonly against powerful corporate opposition. In recent years, legislators in 17 states have introduced bills to create state-owned public banks like the nearly century-old Bank of North Dakota. Roughly the same number of states have considered legislation to establish single-payer healthcare programs. In 2016, voters in Colorado will decide via referendum on the single-payer ColoradoCare initiative.

None of these efforts have had a major impact yet, but they all offer blueprints for the development of a larger platform—along with concrete and actionable examples of what a radically new economy would look like at the level of enterprise, neighborhood, municipality, and state. Importantly, many “nonpolitical” Americans—some of whom even identify as conservatives (as opposed to right-wing ideologues)—support such efforts. Rhetoric aside, these conservative Americans also commonly oppose big government, big banks, and big corporations, and are often open to alternatives.

During the 1930s, strategies based on the seemingly modest efforts developed by the states in their “laboratories of democracy” became the basis for key elements of the New Deal—including labor law, Social Security, and a range of other programs. Modern experiments with socialized ownership suggest a trajectory with similarly far-ranging implications. This will remain true no matter who wins the 2016 presidential race.

A new politics could infuse local examples of public ownership with fresh energy, and perhaps scale them up.

* * *

The great 20th-century conservative economist Joseph Schumpeter once said that the left had missed the boat in its arguments for systemic change. “If radicals were not so fond of chivying the bourgeois,” he declared, they would have realized that not having to depend on taxes was “one of the most significant titles to superiority” they could have advanced in favor of their vision. Indeed, a number of states have gained a great deal of experience owning and managing land, real estate, and mineral rights—and many use the proceeds to fund social services and reduce taxes, although this fact hasn’t received much attention.

Almost 150 years ago, for instance, Texas’s Permanent School Fund took control of about half the land and associated mineral rights in the public domain. In 1953, the state added coastal “submerged lands” to the portfolio after the federal government relinquished them. Each year, distributions from the earnings support education in every county of Texas ($838.7 million in fiscal year 2015 alone). Another fund, the Permanent University Fund, owns more than 2 million acres of land and helps underwrite the state’s public-university system. In these and other cases, social ownership supports public education in ways that also significantly reduce the tax burden.

Similar sovereign-wealth funds exist in Louisiana, New Mexico, Wyoming, and North Dakota. Alaska, of course, famously collects and invests revenue from extraction of the state’s oil and minerals. Dividends are paid out annually to state residents as a matter of legal “right”—the only practical model in the United States of publicly supported income with no additional work requirement. In 2008, under the governorship of Tea Party favorite Sarah Palin, each resident received $2,069—over $10,000 for a family of five—from these “socialized” funds. That year, Palin also signed into law a bill that gave every resident an extra $1,200 from the state’s natural-resource revenues.

The general argument for public ownership has always been much broader than simply capturing profits for social use. For one thing, unlike private corporations, publicly owned enterprises are not required to grow to meet Wall Street’s demand for ever-increasing profits—a critical consideration in any serious effort to move beyond our current “growth at all costs” system toward a more sustainable model. Public forms of enterprise can also be made far more transparent than private firms, and they’re more open to regulation, especially concerning climate change. And, critically, they can be excluded from funding political campaigns.

An obvious question is what to do about large-scale industry—a subject that many have simply avoided, preferring instead to focus on local strategies. Yet even the economist and self-proclaimed socialist E.F. Schumacher, author of the classic Small Is Beautiful, judged that “the idea of private ownership becomes an absurdity” on a larger scale. Americans witnessed this during the most recent financial crisis, when the federal government de facto nationalized several banks, two auto companies, and the insurance ­giant AIG. The government gave them back once the crisis was over, but when the next crisis hits, a future progressive government might well turn them into publicly owned features of a new system. (Breaking up the banks, as some have proposed, would likely produce a subsequent reconsolidation of power—as AT&T and Standard Oil showed after they were broken up.)

A major problem involves the inevitable institutional power that comes with such large scale. During the 1960s and ’70s, the pathbreaking radical historian William Appleman Williams suggested that one way for socialists to deal with this challenge was to focus on regions rather than the national system as a whole—especially in a country the size of the United States.

Modern innovators are bringing a similar idea to life as they experiment with regional models. “Bio-regional” efforts that anchor economic, social, and environmental development in natural regions can be found in places as diverse as the Connecticut Valley and the Ozark Mountains. The Kansas Area Watershed Council, for example, supports sustainable development in the prairie region through a range of projects and community-building events, and the Salmon Nation project is bringing a similar perspective to the Pacific Northwest. Nine states, mainly in New England, have formed the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative to reduce emissions. Another effort, Food Solutions New England, has put forward a comprehensive plan to develop a robust, collaborative, sustainable, and equitable regional food system by 2060.

The most important precedent for a long-term regional plan is the Tennessee Valley Authority. Established by the New Deal, this public-energy corporation currently serves 9 million people in seven states. At one point in the 1930s, Franklin Roosevelt supported legislation that would have created seven “little TVAs” as a step toward a much more expansive economic-development plan. “If we are successful here,” he argued, “we can march on, step by step; in a like development of other great natural territorial units within our borders.”

Although many mid-century theorists and planners believed in the promise of such regional proposals, the development of a more expansive, democratic, and ecologically sustainable regionalist vision was hampered by the centralizing thrust of the New Deal and then cut short by World War II. The TVA itself lost direction and largely succumbed to bureaucratic and other corrosive pressures.

Nevertheless, as today’s regional efforts show, the concept has endured. It’s also worth noting that conservative support for decentralized forms of public ownership may not be totally foreclosed. In 2013, President Obama proposed privatizing the TVA in his annual budget, but a group of Republican legislators, concerned with higher prices for consumers and less money for their states, vigorously (and successfully) opposed the idea. A new and more radical regionalism might also draw some lessons from the conservative Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC), which has recently funded innovative efforts to help move the area away from a coal economy. One such effort is Kentucky’s Shaping Our Appalachian Region (SOAR), which is working to develop local food systems, broadband Internet infrastructure, new businesses, youth engagement, and a stronger cultural identity. The Chesapeake Bay Commission, which includes Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, has brought together a broad coalition to deal with the pollution that threatens the ecological health of a shared regional resource.

California—itself equivalent in scale to a sizable region (and appropriately understood as such)—is a national leader in developing regional climate-change solutions. In October 2015, Governor Jerry Brown signed the most comprehensive and far-reaching climate-change bill that any state has enacted since California first passed landmark climate-change legislation in 2006. The new law requires state utilities to purchase 50 percent of their power from renewable sources by 2030; it also doubles the energy-efficiency requirements of buildings and provides incentives for creating the charging stations needed by electric vehicles.

* * *

Another promising strategy is to combine elements of these various approaches. There is no reason that large-scale enterprises couldn’t be structured as joint ventures that would include worker, community, and regional institutions. Many states and localities across the country collaborate to manage, regulate, and share the benefits of publicly owned electric utilities. Roughly 25 percent of the nation’s electricity is, in fact, supplied by publicly owned firms and co-ops. In conservative Nebraska, every resident and business gets its electricity from a local public utility or cooperative. In both liberal and conservative states, examples of public ownership—municipally owned hospitals, hotels, convention centers, transit systems, ports, and airports, among many other services—are ubiquitous. A new politics might one day infuse these local efforts with fresh purpose and energy, and perhaps scale them up to the state or regional level.

None of this is to suggest that large-scale political change is imminent or inevitable. Social, economic, and environmental conditions—to say nothing of assaults on traditional liberties—are likely to get worse before they get better. For precisely this reason, the systematic development of a practical alternative to the status quo is critically important.

The change we need will not come from the top. As we’ve seen in countless ways, our current political system limits the potential for traditional progressive strategies. A new vision—one that encompasses fresh political strategies as well as new political-economic content—must be built from the bottom up. The overarching goal must be to develop a set of ideas that challenge the dominant ideologies and move the country in a fundamentally new direction.

The Sanders insurgency, the polling data, and the growing experimentation with a range of alternatives all suggest that we may be on the brink of a new era—an extended and difficult period in which a new economy is slowly forged. Such a system might perhaps be called a “pluralist commonwealth” to reflect its diverse forms of common ownership. But whatever we call it, it is time to start discussing this system more openly and to refine its practical elements. As ever-greater numbers of Americans are forced to ask fundamental questions about where their nation is going, we must start offering the answers.

At the World Robot Conference in Beijing, attendees watch an industrial robot write Chinese characters.

Why It Matters

China needs to increase production even as the wages of those working in manufacturing increase.

China needs advanced robotics to help balance its economic, social, and technological ambitions with continued growth.

By Will Knight

MIT Technology Review

Dec 7, 2015  – China is laying the groundwork for a robot revolution by planning to automate the work currently done by millions of low-paid workers.

The government’s plan will be crucial to a broader effort to reform China’s economy while also meeting the ambitious production goals laid out in its latest economic blueprint, which aims to double per capita income by 2020 from 2016 levels with at least 6.5 percent annual growth. The success of this effort could, in turn, affect the vitality of the global economy.

The scale and importance of China’s robot ambitions were made clear when the vice president of the People’s Republic of China, Li Yuanchao, appeared at the country’s first major robotics conference, held recently in Beijing. Standing onstage between two humanoid entertainment robots with outsized heads, Li delivered a message from China’s leader, Xi Jinping, congratulating the organizers of the effort. He also made it clear that robotics would be a major priority for the country’s economic future.

Many of the robots on show at the conference’s exhibition hall were service or entertainment robots such as automated vacuum cleaners, cheap drones, or quirky looking machines designed to serve as personal companions. But there were also many industrial robots that signaled the real impetus for China’s robot push: its manufacturing sector.

China is already the world’s largest producer of everything from clothes to electronics, but much of it depends on low-cost, low-skill labor. And even as economic growth has slowed, wages continue to rise across the country as the economy evolves. The Chinese government is also eager to see its workforce diversify and its manufacturing industries become more technologically advanced.

The latest robot from China’s Siasun has six joints, making it more dextrous.

Robots might offer a clever solution to some of these challenges. If more robots can be deployed successfully in many manufacturing plants, this would increase efficiency while also allowing some workers to be replaced. At the same time, because more capable robots will require advanced sensing, manipulation, and intelligence, the drive could help promote the technical expertise of the remaining manufacturing workers, as well as those employed in designing, building, and servicing these manufacturing machines.

The scale of this robot revolution could be enormous. Two years ago China became the world’s largest importer of robots, and the International Federation of Robotics, an industry group, estimates that China will account for more than a third of all industrial robots installed worldwide by 2018. Yet the number of robots per worker in China is far lower than in many industrially advanced countries, indicating a huge potential for growth.

A more comprehensive effort to upgrade China’s manufacturing base is already underway, under a program announced in May known as Made in China 2025, which aims to make China an innovative and green “world manufacturing power” by that year. The effort involves adding connectivity and intelligence to manufacturing equipment and factories, to improve overall flexibility and efficiency. It was inspired by Germany’s Industry 4.0 effort, launched in 2011, and by similar efforts to promote more advanced manufacturing in the U.S.

The robotic component of this overhaul will be about more than just installing more robots in manufacturing plants, however. Some of the tasks currently done by humans cannot easily be automated at low cost while others, such as fine manipulation or visual inspection, will require sophisticated hardware and software to mechanize.

Tianran Wang, a member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and an expert on industrial automation, spoke about China’s manufacturing industry at the Beijing event. He said that it lagged behind those of other nations and would need a major technological overhaul. He also emphasized that part of the challenge will be figuring out which tasks can be automated most effectively, and how machines and humans can share the workload. “Not all labor-intensive industry can be automated,” Tianran said. “We need hybrid automation.”

China may soon become not only an important market for more advanced robotic technology, but a producer of more advanced robot systems itself. Many international robot makers were present at the Beijing conference, including the German giant Kuka and the Swiss company ABB. But dozens of Chinese robot companies were also present, including some companies that have only been around for a few years.

Siasun, an industrial robot manufacturer based in Shanghai, is developing a range of robots designed to help factories automate more of their work. In an industrial park on the outskirts of the city, at a showroom where the company demonstrates new products to prospective customers, I saw a dexterous new six-axis robot arm in action as well as wheeled robots that move products from one part of a production line to the next. The company is also developing robotic solutions that are customized for specific industries, such as a robot for painting the sides of ships by climbing up and down a cable that hangs down the side of the hull.

Daokui Qu, the president of Siansun, said the priorities for robot makers would be to develop more flexible systems with advanced sensing, as well as finding better ways for robots to toil effectively and safely alongside human workers. He added that the company had already received a lot of orders for the mobile robot arm it was developing, and that it was developing a gesture-controlled robot that should be easier for workers to interact with.

Before leaving the stage to tour the Beijing conference’s exhibition hall, Vice President Li suggested that robotics researchers and companies from outside the country would be welcome to take part in the country’s robot revolution: “China would like to welcome robot experts and entrepreneurs from all over the world to communicate and co?perate with us, in order to push forward the development of robot technology and industry.”

The new Crossrail trains will be 200-m (656-ft) long and will accommodate up to 1,500 passengers (Credit: Transport for London)

Image Gallery (4 images)

By Stu Roberts

GizMag

Nov 23, 2015 – The trains for the UK’s new Crossrail rail link have been unveiled. They will be over one-and-a-half times as long as London’s longest Tube train and will accommodate 1,500 passengers. Features will include regenerative braking, intelligent lighting and temperature systems, and free Wi-Fi and 4G access.

The 118-km (73-mile) Crossrail route is said to be Europe’s biggest construction project, boasting 10 new stations and 42 km (26 miles) of new tunnels. Tunneling was completed earlier this year and much of the excavated 6 million tonnes (6.6 million tons) of material has been used to develop the Wallasea Island nature reserve in Essex. The project still has a number of milestones to deliver, though, such as fitting out stations, the completion of above-ground works and, of course, the roll-out of the new trains.

Designed by Transport for London (TfL), Bombardier and Barber & Osgerby, the 200-m (656-ft) trains will be driver-operated and will comprise nine fully-interconnected walk-through carriages. TfL says they are to be built of strong and lightweight materials, such as aluminum for the body shell. It also says they will be faster than the trains they will replace, while using up to 30 percent less energy as a result of their regenerative braking.

Boarding and alighting will be made quicker and easier by virtue of large, clear areas around the doors. Once aboard, passengers have a choice of both metro-style and bay seating. There will be four dedicated wheelchair spaces on each train, as well as a number of multi-use spaces for items like strollers and luggage. Passengers will be able plan their onward journeys using real-time travel information displayed by on-board info systems and will also benefit from free Wi-Fi and access to 4G.

The interior design and color scheme of the trains is said to have been chosen to provide "an accessible and welcoming environment." The design makes use of darker floors and natural finish materials that will "wear in, and not wear out," as well as light colored ceilings that are aimed at providing a sense of spaciousness.

The new trains are scheduled to enter service from May 2017, with the full Crossrail route due to be operational from 2019.