For the first time in history more than one in every 100 adults in America are in jail or prison—a fact that significantly impacts state budgets without delivering a clear return on public safety. According to a new report released today by the Pew Center on the States’ Public Safety Performance Project, at the start of 2008, 2,319,258 adults were held in American prisons or jails, or one in every 99.1 men and women, according to the study. During 2007, the prison population rose by more than 25,000 inmates. In addition to detailing state and regional prison growth rates, Pew’s report, One in 100: Behind Bars in America 2008, identifies how corrections spending compares to other state investments, why it has increased, and what some states are doing to limit growth in both prison populations and costs while maintaining public safety.As prison populations expand, costs to states are on the rise. Last year alone, states spent more than $49 billion on corrections, up from $11 billion 20 years before. However, the national recidivism rate remains virtually unchanged, with about half of released inmates returning to jail or prison within three years. And while violent criminals and other serious offenders account for some of the growth, many inmates are low-level offenders or people who have violated the terms of their probation or parole.
“For all the money spent on corrections today, there hasn’t been a clear and convincing return for public safety,” said Adam Gelb, director of the Public Safety Performance Project. “More and more states are beginning to rethink their reliance on prisons for lower-level offenders and finding strategies that are tough on crime without being so tough on taxpayers.”
Archive for February, 2008
No. The correct answer is NOT build more prisons
Thursday, February 28th, 2008Solar Sunday
Sunday, February 24th, 2008Solar Sunday is my weekly roundup of renewable energy and energy efficiency news from around the web.
The wind turbines that recently went up on Louis Brooks’s ranch are twice as high as the Statue of Liberty, with blades as wide as the wingspan of a jumbo jet. More important from his point of view, he is paid $500 a month apiece to permit 78 of them on his land, with 76 more on the way.“That’s just money you’re hearing,” he said as they hummed in a brisk breeze recently.
This month, 69-year-old Japanese sailor Ken-ichi Horie will attempt to captain the world’s most advanced wave-powered boat 4,350 miles from Hawaii to Japan. If all goes as planned, he’ll set the first Guinness world record for the longest distance traveled by a wave-powered boat and, along the way, show off the greenest nautical propulsion system since the sail.
The energy from sunlight falling on only 9 percent of California’s Mojave Desert could power all of the United States’ electricity needs if the energy could be efficiently harvested, according to some estimates. Unfortunately, current-generation solar cell technologies are too expensive and inefficient for wide-scale commercial applications.A team of Northwestern University researchers has developed a new anode coating strategy that significantly enhances the efficiency of solar energy power conversion. A paper about the work, which focuses on “engineering” organic material-electrode interfaces in bulk-heterojunction organic solar cells, is published online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
Climate change leads to snakes on a plane
Burmese pythons—an invasive species in south Florida—could find comfortable climatic conditions in roughly a third of the United States according to new “climate maps” developed by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). Although other factors such as type of food available and suitable shelter also play a role, Burmese pythons and other giant constrictor snakes have shown themselves to be highly adaptable to new environments.
US energy company Tenaska announced Tuesday a proposal for a new 600-megawatt, coal-fired power plant in Texas that would be the first to capture and store carbon dioxide emissions underground.
The privately held company proposed a site near Sweetwater, Texas, where its plan would capture up to 90 percent of the carbon dioxide (CO2) that would otherwise enter the atmosphere.The carbon dioxide would be sold for use in oil production in the Permian Basin, resulting in geologic storage.
Tenaska filed a request for a state permit for the plant, whose cost was estimated at three billion dollars, but said a final decision to proceed would be made in 2009 depending on incentives, costs and prices for electricity and CO2.
Most of us are worried about increasing amounts of greenhouse gases in the air – and if you aren’t yet concerned about this, you should be. However, now there is a reason for hope: researchers from the Los Alamos National Laboratory have just announced a groundbreaking new project called Green Freedom, which will extract CO2 from the air and convert it into fuel to power cars and airplanes. Talk about killing two birds with one stone! Not only will this remove some of the greenhouse gas currently in our atmosphere, but it will prevent future CO2 from being added to our air, by providing a new renewable form of fuel to power our lives.
Solar Power Lights up the Future
He predicted the fall of the Soviet Union. He predicted the explosive spread of the Internet and wireless access.Now futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil is part of distinguished panel of engineers that says solar power will scale up to produce all the energy needs of Earth’s people in 20 years.
There is 10,000 times more sunlight than we need to meet 100 percent of our energy needs, he says, and the technology needed for collecting and storing it is about to emerge as the field of solar energy is going to advance exponentially in accordance with Kurzweil’s Law of Accelerating Returns. That law yields a doubling of price performance in information technologies every year.
Plants trees and algae do it. Even some bacteria and moss do it, but scientists have had a difficult time developing methods to turn sunlight into useful fuel. Now, Penn State researchers have a proof-of-concept device that can split water and produce recoverable hydrogen.“This is a proof-of-concept system that is very inefficient. But ultimately, catalytic systems with 10 to 15 percent solar conversion efficiency might be achievable,” says Thomas E. Mallouk, the DuPont Professor of Materials Chemistry and Physics. “If this could be realized, water photolysis would provide a clean source of hydrogen fuel from water and sunlight.”
What a difference an octave makes
Saturday, February 23rd, 2008I have been interested in the attributes of light and sound for a long
time. The effects of resonance, harmonics, harmony, discord and the
many other aspects of sound have fed my interest in music for some
forty years now. Though I have some degree of red-green
color-blindness I have enjoyed painting and I have made my living in
the printing trade for twenty five years, developing some expertise in
the subtle manipulation of colored pigments to achieve a variety of
results.When I encountered the system of correspondence between color and
sound which is presented as “The Queens Scale” in much esoteric
teaching I was intrigued. Of course my first question was “What is the
connection?” Why is it said that the pitches of the western
twelve-tone scale correspond to the twelve primary, secondary and
tertiary colors? Besides the very nice (and suggestive) fact that
there are twelve members of each set, what do they have in common? It
seems to me that the clear answer is that light and sound are both
conveniently described as waves, albeit of greatly different
frequencies. Perhaps, I thought, there is an instructive relationship
between the frequencies of the light of the twelve colors and the
frequencies of the sounds of the twelve tones. I decided to
investigate.[SNIP]
I was surprised to find that the wavelengths of the colors did fall
approximately within the range of one octave! Perhaps they actually do
correspond mathematically to the pitches of the twelve tone scale. The
next step was to determine what note each of the colors actually is.
Solar Sunday
Sunday, February 17th, 2008Solar Sunday is my weekly roundup of renewable energy and energy efficiency news from around the web.
“For entrepreneurs, energy is going to be cool for the next 30 years,” he says.Optimism about creating a “Solar Valley” in the geographic shadow of computing all-stars like Intel, Apple and Google is widespread among some solar evangelists.
“The solar industry today is like the late 1970s when mainframe computers dominated, and then Steve Jobs and I.B.M. came out with personal computers,” says R. Martin Roscheisen, the chief executive of Nanosolar, a solar company in San Jose, Calif.
Nanosolar shipped its first “thin film” solar panels in December, and the company says it ultimately wants to produce panels that are both more efficient in converting sunlight into electricity and less expensive than today’s versions. Dramatic improvements in computer chips over many years turned the PC and the cellphone into powerful, inexpensive appliances — and the foundation of giant industries. Solar enterprises are hoping for the same outcome.
What do you get when you combine the innovation of MagLev technology with solar power, hydrogen fuel, and a futuristic aesthetic? The Interstate Traveler Hydrogen Super Highway, or the Traveler- a ground-breaking solar powered, hydrogen-fueled, zero emission mass transit system that would carry everything from people to cars in sustainable style and carbon neutral function. The construction is set to begin this year, and would connect Ann Arbor and Detroit.The highway is made up of a slew of systems called the rail conduit cluster and will provide a comprehensive integrated system of the public/private transit system and municipal infrastructure network. It would serve as public transport system AND distribute electricity, potable water, liquid waste, fiber optics, hydrogen, oxygen, and fuels.
The public transit component would combine high speed magnetically levitated (MagLev, which we’ve seen in wind turbines before) cars running on parallel magnetic rails, laminated solar cells, and the conduit cluster that would be used to distribute electricity, water, fuels, etc. (It has been projected that each mile of rail would produce about 844,800 watts of electricity per hour at peak time using the solar energy). As for fuel, hydrogen would be used in fuel cells, internal combustion engines, micro turbines and other energy conversion devices to generate power.
The greenies among us will love this: the Strapya mini solar cell phone charger! Smaller than an iPod, this device only needs to drink up 6-10 hours of sunlight and then it serves as a completely dependable backup power source for your cell phone. The mini solar charger hooks up to your phone via an adapter and offers up to 3 hours of energy on the go.
Jeffrey Inaba and C-LAB have created this mandala of consumption, refuse, and plastic waste, with one side dedicated to the “hydration compulsion” that helps puts millions of one-use bottles in places bottles aren’t meant to be.
Sponges that soak up carbon dioxide could provide a new weapon in the battle against global warming. These materials hold promise as filters in power station flues and vehicle exhausts, capturing the gas before it can reach the atmosphere and affect the climate.Researchers at the University of California synthesised a range of new sponge-like substances with pores just the right size to trap molecules of CO2. The most efficient of them can absorb 83 times its own volume of the gas.
Once the sponge is full, the gas could be stripped out for disposal in large, natural caverns deep underground or beneath the seabed. The sponge can be filled and emptied indefinitely, simply by varying the overhead pressure.
The hope is that the sponge will make carbon capture and storage more attractive and cheaper than at present.
Dance your iPod to full charge
A nanotech invention by a US research team offers an intriguing glimpse of the future: slip on some nanowire-embedded clothes, plug your MP3 player or cellphone into them, and as you dance or walk around, your outfit generates enough power to run the gadget. More details on how the fabric works, and some nano-imagery after the jump.
New Record in Solar Efficiency
On a perfect New Mexico winter day — with the sky almost 10 percent brighter than usual — Sandia National Laboratories and Stirling Energy Systems (SES) set a new solar-to-grid system conversion efficiency record by achieving a 31.25 percent net efficiency rate. The old 1984 record of 29.4 percent was toppled Jan. 31 on SES’s “Serial #3” solar dish Stirling system at Sandia’s National Solar Thermal Test Facility.The conversion efficiency is calculated by measuring the net energy delivered to the grid and dividing it by the solar energy hitting the dish mirrors. Auxiliary loads, such as water pumps, computers and tracking motors, are accounted for in the net power measurement.
“Gaining two whole points of conversion efficiency in this type of system is phenomenal,” says Bruce Osborn, SES president and CEO. “This is a significant advancement that takes our dish engine systems well beyond the capacities of any other solar dish collectors and one step closer to commercializing an affordable system.”
Quote for Today
Tuesday, February 12th, 2008“Evil is like a shadow – it has no real substance of its own, it is simply a lack of light. You cannot cause a shadow to disappear by trying to fight it, stamp on it, by railing against it, or any other form of emotional or physical resistance. In order to cause a shadow to disappear, you must shine light on it.”
-Shakti Gawain, teacher and author
Mazurkas
Monday, February 11th, 2008My lighting in today’s New York Times.
Color Codes: a point of hue
Sunday, February 10th, 2008Color Codes: a point of hue
Choreography by Trebien Pollard
All Photographs Copyright 2007 Julie Lemburger
Solar Sunday
Sunday, February 10th, 2008Solar Sunday is my weekly roundup of renewable energy and energy efficiency news from around the web.
Solar power without the sun ? ! ?
Despite the enormous untapped potential of solar energy, one thing is for sure- photovoltaics are only as good as the sun’s rays shining upon them. However, researchers at the Idaho National Laboratory are close to the production of a super-thin solar film that would be cost-effective, imprinted on flexible materials, and would be able to harvest solar energy even after sunset!
Biofuels, once seen as a useful way of combating climate change, could actually increase greenhouse gas emissions, say two major new studies.And it may take tens or hundreds of years to pay back the “carbon debt” accrued by growing biofuels in the first place, say researchers. The calculations join a growing list of studies questioning whether switching to biofuels really will help combat climate change.
Biofuel production has accelerated over the last 5 years, spurred in part by a US drive to produce corn-derived ethanol as an alternative to petrol.
The idea makes intuitive environmental sense – plants take up carbon dioxide as they grow, so biofuels should help reduce greenhouse gas emissions – but the full environmental cost of biofuels is only now becoming clear.
Extra emissions are created from the production of fertiliser needed to grow corn, for example, leading some researchers to predict that the energy released by burning ethanol is only 25% greater than that used to grow and process the fuel.
To the long list of natural blessings to resent Hawaii for, you can add a dizzying abundance of clean, renewable energy sources. The state announced in late January that it had formed a partnership with the federal Energy Department to plunge into green technologies and to outpace the nation in moving beyond fossil fuels. Two highly plausible reactions to the news were: 1) of course, and 2) what took it so long?It’s almost embarrassing how green things could be in blue Hawaii. There’s all that sunshine and those trade winds, plus a volcano that has been lazily erupting for the last 25 years. Many barrels of biofuel await tapping in vast acres of sugar cane. Funkier ideas like harnessing tides and waves and growing oily algae play to Hawaii’s strengths. Energy-wise, Hawaii is like that “Star Trek” planet that Captain Kirk was trapped on, with all the raw minerals he needed to save himself from an angry alien lizard if he could only … figure out … how to put them … together.
City of the Future = Carbon Neutral
Norman Foster’s Masdar City is poised to become world’s most sustainable, zero-waste, car-free, carbon neutral city. The model for the city was formally unveiled on 21st January at the World Future Energy Summit in Abu Dhabi. We’ve talked about the grand scheme before, but the official debut deserves some new attention, given its viewing and support from everyone from General Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi to the Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company and even President George W. Bush. The construction would start the next month, and the city is likely to open in late 2009.The city, to be built on an area of six square kilometers on the outskirts of Abu Dhabi, has been designed by British architect Lord Foster (Foster and Partners). The city would be walled on all sides, and house 50,000 people and 1,500 businesses. The electricity for the entire city would be generated by solar energy harnessed by photovoltaic panels. To start with, a large solar power station would be built that would meet the energy requirements during the construction of the city, while buildings would be cooled by wind towers.
People, the energy source of the future
The designers at New York City based Fluxxlab studio have come up with an ingenious sustainable energy harvesting idea that makes you wonder why no one else has thought of it before. Their Revolution Door manages to capture otherwise wasted human energy from the revolving doors we all see at various large buildings. If you think about it, this concept is quite similar to a turbine spinning somewhere deep inside a hydroelectric dam or within wind turbine to generate renewable electricity.
It’s the little things that count
Researchers at MIT and Texas Instruments have unveiled a new chip design for portable electronics that can be up to 10 times more energy-efficient than present technology. The design could lead to cell phones, implantable medical devices and sensors that last far longer when running from a battery.
When you ignore reality, poverty is just like wealth
Sunday, February 10th, 2008It is amazing how the rich can justify their greed by ignoring the fact that the working poor in this country live largely on credit and thus assume debts way beyond their means.
Link
It’s true that the share of national income going to the richest 20 percent of households rose from 43.6 percent in 1975 to 49.6 percent in 2006, the most recent year for which the Bureau of Labor Statistics has complete data. Meanwhile, families in the lowest fifth saw their piece of the pie fall from 4.3 percent to 3.3 percent.Income statistics, however, don’t tell the whole story of Americans’ living standards. Looking at a far more direct measure of American families’ economic status — household consumption — indicates that the gap between rich and poor is far less than most assume, and that the abstract, income-based way in which we measure the so-called poverty rate no longer applies to our society.
The top fifth of American households earned an average of $149,963 a year in 2006. As shown in the first accompanying chart, they spent $69,863 on food, clothing, shelter, utilities, transportation, health care and other categories of consumption. The rest of their income went largely to taxes and savings.
The bottom fifth earned just $9,974, but spent nearly twice that — an average of $18,153 a year. How is that possible? A look at the far right-hand column of the consumption chart, labeled “financial flows,” shows why: those lower-income families have access to various sources of spending money that doesn’t fall under taxable income. These sources include portions of sales of property like homes and cars and securities that are not subject to capital gains taxes, insurance policies redeemed, or the drawing down of bank accounts. While some of these families are mired in poverty, many (the exact proportion is unclear) are headed by retirees and those temporarily between jobs, and thus their low income total doesn’t accurately reflect their long-term financial status.
