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The environmental group, which released the findings of a sector study, said the EU Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) gives no incentive to move away from the most polluting coal-fired power stations and warned that Poland and other eastern European members were lobbying against a planned overhaul of the system after 2012.

At the root of WWF’s gripe is the free distribution of polluting permits to the 27 EU nations.

These can be sold on to other companies who need more than their allocation of carbon dioxide emissions.

“The way in which the national allocation plans are set up is a disaster,” said Sanjeev Kumar, Emissions Trading Scheme Coordinator at WWF.

“Handing free pollution permits to power companies is like handing them a cash bonus,” he said, adding “cheap profits for doing nothing is scandalous.”

The power companies “are simply returning the financial gains to their investors” instead of investing in cleaner technology, he told AFP.

“The revenues from the sales and auctioning of the pollution permits need to be fully re-invested in climate change policies both in Europe and developing countries,” he said.

The national carbon emission levels have been set from 2008-2012 with the vast majority of the allocations given out for free.

If emissions produced by a company involved in the scheme exceed agreed levels, that company will face heavy fines, unless it purchases pollution permits as a way of offsetting the excess.

As a result, the allowances have both a carbon value — every tonne of CO2 is equal to one pollution allowance — and a monetary value.

That system is set to change in 2013 with the power companies forced to buy their pollution permits, but the WWF fears those plans may be altered, with companies in several countries already lobbying against them.

“We’ve already started to see a lot of people backing away from it… for example Poland and a lot of the new member states are lobbying very intensively to have less exposure to auctions in the power generation sector,” said Kumar.

The WWF commissioned Point Carbon, a provider of information and analysis on carbon markets, to do a study assessing the potential and scale of windfall profits to the power sector in Britain, Germany, Spain, Italy and Poland.

Over the 2008-2012 period the report estimated that profits in the power sector in these countries attributable to the permits could be as high as 71 billion euros.

The ETS is part of a broader energy and climate change package to help achieve the EU’s aim is of limiting average global temperatures to two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

European Union nations have thus committed to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent by 2020, from 1990 levels.

Under the plans, the use of renewable energies like biomass, wind and solar power will rise to 20 percent of all energy forms. Biofuels will also have to make up 10 percent of fuels used for transport.

They have also offered to slash greenhouse gas emissions by 30 percent if other developed countries agree to deep cuts.

WWF also voiced concern that some European nations are boosting the role of heavily polluting coal-burning power plants.

“There are currently plans to build 40 major new coal fired power stations in Europe in the next five years,” said Kumar.

“These are expected to run for 50 years or more and could lock us into decades of soaring emissions,” he added.

admin :: Apr.09.2008 :: Science :: No Comments »

In his short story “The Nine Billion Names of God,” published in 1953, Clarke wrote of a pair of computer programmers sent to a remote monastery in Tibet to help the monks there use a computer to compile a list of all the names of God. Once the list was complete, the monks believed, human and cosmic destiny would be fulfilled and the world would end.

The programmers are fleeing the mountain, hoping to escape the monks’ wrath when the program finishes and the world is still there, when one of them looks up.

“Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.”

That was a typical Clarke ending, and it seemed only natural upon his death that nature might want to reciprocate.

Last week, lacking the chance of my own sign from heaven, I went home and dug out one of my most prized mementos, a letter Clarke had written to me in 1991 about a book I had written, “Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos.” He liked the book, which featured sketches of astronomers he had known long ago in California, but hated the title, which he described as “cute” and “off-putting.”

No matter. For me, with the receipt of that letter, a circle had been closed. Now it has opened again, and I have lost a distant grandfather of sorts.

To the world at large Arthur C. Clarke was probably best known as the co-creator with Stanley Kubrick of the classic 1968 movie “2001: A Space Odyssey,” a visual tone poem featuring a malevolent computer named Hal and a pair of astronauts in search of a mysterious monolith that seems to be the key to the origin and evolution of humanity.

But Clarke* was much more than a science fiction writer. A genuine rocket scientist, he predicted in 1945 in the journal Wireless World that satellites in geosynchronous orbits would be used as “extra-terrestrial relays” for broadcasting to the Earth below. The concept he had been pushing for the last few decades, of an elevator to space, might yet become a reality. As he said last fall on the 50th anniversary of Sputnik, people stopped laughing at it a long time ago.

To space fans and perpetual adolescents everywhere he was simply the deceptively dry voice of cosmic wonder. Few writers have seemed to inhabit the cosmos, its grandeur, mystery and, yes, its ultimate coldness, with such aplomb, from the balletic spaceships and the mysterious fetus of “2001” to the Jesuit astronaut in the mischievous short story “The Star.” The astronaut finds his faith sorely challenged when the expedition he is on discovers the remains of a great civilization that was torched when its sun exploded in a supernova 2000 years ago. It was that catastrophe, of course, that blazed forth in Earth’s skies as the star of Bethlehem.

Destiny was Clarke’s leitmotif, his own literary monolith. His earliest novel, “Against the Fall of Night,” later reprised as “The City and the Stars,” was about a city so traumatized by space and history that it had walled off the sky. In “Childhood’s End,” aliens known as Overlords come to Earth to enforce peace and help prepare for the next stage of human evolution, and then are left behind, like disappointed bridesmaids, as the new race, drunk with new powers, blows up its old planet and swoops off into the cosmos to merge with the Overmind.

I’ve lived in Clarke’s universe ever since I was in eighth grade and a classmate slipped me a paperback edition of Clarke’s “Reach for Tomorrow,” a collection of short stories. Until that point my biggest ambition was to play second base for the New York Yankees.

Clarke yanked my sights quite a bit higher — a lot higher. In the triumphalism of postwar American middle-class life, it was a revelation to be reminded of the wonder of what I like to call cosmic ignorance.

I went from reading science fiction to reading books by George Gamow and pop-science explications of the debate then raging between the Big Bang and Steady State theories of the universe. The next thing I knew I was at M.I.T.

Now it’s my own job to explicate those and even more abstruse debates. And it’s a little embarrassing to admit now, as an alleged grown-up, an M.I.T. graduate, a father and a journalist, just how much of my metaphysical foundation comes from Clarke. I might sum it up as: the universe is a strange place, we are children here at best, ignorant of our origins, our future or even the right questions to ask.

I haven’t lost my taste for cosmic mystery, for the curiosity about what might lie around the curve of the cosmos that Clarke first instilled in me. Clarke’s gravestone says that he never grew up, and you could say that I haven’t either. Like one of Peter Pan’s Lost Boys, or the Who, I hope I never do.

Like one of the old horror masters, Clarke knew that imagination and suggestion always trumped explanation. In “The Sentinel,” one of the most haunting science fiction stories ever written, and the seed from which “2001” later sprang, a pair of astronauts mountain-climbing on the Moon come across a pyramidal structure. Trying to open it, they realize they have set off a cosmic alarm. Somebody, somewhere, now knows we are here.

“I can never look now at the Milky Way without wondering from which of those banked clouds of stars the emissaries are coming,” Clarke’s narrator says at the end. “If you will pardon so commonplace a simile, we have set off the fire-alarm and have nothing to do but to wait. I do not think we will have to wait for long.”

When Clarke died, one of his few disappointments was that we had not yet heard from any extraterrestrial intelligence, although anybody within 50 light-years sufficiently advanced could easily tell we are here.

As it turned out, though, there was something to be seen in the sky that night. In the kind of coincidence that would have delighted Clarke and set his fictive powers going, a new star appeared briefly on Wednesday morning, visible to the naked eye, in the constellation Boötes. It was the remains of a cataclysmic explosion, a gamma-ray burst, that must have torched a galaxy seven billion light-years away, around the curve of the cosmos, as Clarke might have put it.

Nobody knows if there could have been somebody or something living there, when the universe was half its present age. When I heard about it I couldn’t help thinking about Clarke’s Jesuit and the star of Bethlehem. Whoever or whatever was there now belongs to the ages.

Darkness has now reclaimed that spot in the sky.

admin :: Mar.26.2008 :: Science :: No Comments »

The Facebook Actionscript API provides an interface between the Facebook REST based API and Flash/Flex based applications.

A Google Group has been created for discussion of this API as well as for release announcements. Grab the feed for your reader or join the group to get in on the discussion.

The open-source Actionscript 3 library was developed with Adobe Flex 2 in mind but will work in Adobe Flash 9 or Flex 3 as well. The API will allow developers to create desktop applications, website applications, or applications integrated into the Facebook website.

The API is being developed by Jason Crist, an employee of Cynergy Systems. It was originally authored under the direction of Terralever, an online marketing firm with strength in Flash-based media.

This is API is a SECURE ActionScript API. The Facebook JavaScrpt API is used as a bridge when run embedded in the Facebook site. See an example of how to get that working in the source.
What do I get?

Download the beta release of the API and check out the example applications.

If you just want the library without all that messy code you can just grab the .swc.

There is also ASDoc generated that can be downloaded or viewed online.

If you would like to see a (simple and ugly) example of the API being used you can download a simple example (in the src or available seperately) and view the working example in Facebook.

The source and documentation is available by svn as well.
How’s the progress?

Almost done! All of the non-beta functions are implemented and we’re just working out the kinks. The beta methods will be implemented before we go 1.0.

Please also be aware of another AS3 Facebook API headed up by Keith Salisbury. It is a finely crafted API, however the way I want to use an API is different that how that one is crafted (AS3 Flikr API). Hopefully you, the Facebook ActionScript developer, will be better off with a choice.

admin :: Mar.03.2008 :: Uncategorized :: No Comments »

With tongue firmly in cheek, DOM Scripting Task Force member Dean Edwards says:

Just what the world needs, another JavaScript library.

That hasn’t stopped him from creating Another JavaScript Library Without Documentation. But this isn’t a big full-featured library along the lines of jQuery or YUI. Instead, this works more along the lines of Dean’s famous IE7 script: it’s a patch for current browsers. For example, it fixes Internet Explorers buggy implentation of. It also fixes broken browser implementations of the event handling method:

So, as you can see, it doesn’t do much. But what it does, it does consistently across a lot of platforms.

If you’re finding cross-browser DOM Scripting to be a real hassle, this could be just what you need. It creates a level playing field. You won’t get any fancy animations or $ shortcuts but you will get peace of mind for 20K. This probably isn’t a script for beginners but if you’re an advanced developer, you might appreciate the power this gives you.

admin :: Mar.02.2008 :: Science :: No Comments »

A fossilised “sea monster” unearthed on an Arctic island is the largest marine reptile known to science, Norwegian scientists have announced.

The 150 million-year-old specimen was found on Spitspergen, in the Arctic island chain of Svalbard, in 2006.

The Jurassic-era leviathan is one of 40 sea reptiles from a fossil “treasure trove” uncovered on the island.

Nicknamed “The Monster”, the immense creature would have measured 15m (50ft) from nose to tail.

And during the last field expedition, scientists discovered the remains of another so-called pliosaur which is thought to belong to the same species as The Monster - and may have been just as colossal.

The expedition’s director Dr Jorn Hurum, from the University of Oslo Natural History Museum, said the Svalbard specimen is 20% larger than the previous biggest marine reptile - another massive pliosaur from Australia called Kronosaurus.

“We have carried out a search of the literature, so we now know that we have the biggest [pliosaur]. It’s not just arm-waving anymore,” Dr Hurum told the BBC News website.

“The flipper is 3m long with very few parts missing. On Monday, we assembled all the bones in our basement and we amazed ourselves - we had never seen it together before.”

admin :: Mar.02.2008 :: Science :: No Comments »

Bats use the same aerodynamic mechanism as insects to hover in one place, scientists have found.

Writing in Science, they said that as the animal flapped its wings downwards, the motion created a tiny cyclone of air known as a “leading edge vortex”.

This provided enough lift force to keep the bat airborne while hovering or flying in slow motion.

The trick has been seen before in insects, but until now has not been shown in larger, heavier creatures.

A joint Swedish and US team set up honey-water feeding stations in a wind tunnel, then used fog, lasers and high speed cameras to study how the bats flew.

By tracking the fog particles, they deduced that leading edge vortices (LEVs) provide as much as 40% of the lift force that helped the bats stay aloft.

The animal uses thumbs and fingers embedded in the skin membrane of its wings like flaps on an aeroplane to alter the curve of the wing and create the lift force required to hover.

Insects have thicker wings than bats and cannot control the movement to the same extent, the team said.

But they are able to produce LEVs because they beat their wings very quickly.

The findings could be used to improve the design of tiny aeroplanes used in surveillance.

“It’s an important piece of information to know how to generate the control of the wing shape,” said lead author Anders Hedenstrom of Lund University.

“This shows we still have lots of engineering design inspiration to recover from nature.”

admin :: Mar.02.2008 :: Science :: No Comments »