Much Better Battery Technology As A Big Idea

Batteries have become an intense area of research.

Recently there have been a number of reports that Apple’s release of its new operating system, iO7, had caused unexpected problems for battery life in most older iPhones. Another way of saying this, is what a mobile phone salesman at The Waterfront, in downtown Vancouver said to me, “Everybody wants there phones to do too much stuff!”  His comment came after I had bought one of the new external batter boosters for my smartphone. An entirely new accessory market has opened up, selling extended battery life for you phone, when you are not able to use your charger. This is not a real or long term solution. As many of my students know, battery life and heat dissipation on the microchips are among the most important areas of technology research today. It is also worth noting that this problem has also led to advances in the Universal Serial Bus (USB) architecture which are also likely to help address the problem of power and energy efficiency technology devices..

Going viral

Modified viruses help researchers boost battery performance

Nov 23rd 2013 | CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS |Reblogged from The Economist Science & Technology Section

BUILDING a better battery has become an intense area of research. A device that could store more power in the same amount of weight as widely used lithium-ion cells could, for instance, allow smartphones to run for weeks on a single charge or an electric car to be driven non-stop for hundreds of kilometres. Among the alternatives being explored, lithium-air batteries are a favourite. But they can be tricky to make and unreliable. Now researchers have found a way to overcome some of those shortcomings with the help of genetically modified viruses.

Using viruses to make batteries is not new: Angela Belcher and her colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) demonstrated in 2009 that it was possible by getting modified viruses to coat themselves with the necessary materials required for the anode and cathode in a small button-sized lithium-ion cell.

In this section

• Acid test
• Of mice and men
• Going viral
• The father of genomics

Lithium-air batteries oxidise lithium at the anode and reduce oxygen at the cathode to induce a current flow. Because the oxygen comes from the air there is no need for some of the relatively heavy internal materials used in other types of battery. That promises a greatly increased energy density (the amount of power that can be stored in a given weight of battery).

In a new paper in Nature Communications the MIT team describes using modified viruses to make a cathode for a lithium-air battery. A cathode is usually harder to produce than an anode because it needs to be highly conductive. The viruses were genetically engineered to capture molecules of manganese oxide—a popular material for building lithium-air cathodes—in a solution of water. They then bind the material into an array of manganese-oxide nanowires with rough, spiky surfaces. Unlike the smooth nanowires made with conventional chemical processes, the spikes increase the surface area available for electrochemical reactions when the battery is charged and discharged. A small quantity of metal, such as palladium, is added to boost conductivity.

Making things with viruses—in this case a common bacteriophage which infects bacteria but is harmless to humans—might seem unusual. But it is similar to the biosynthesis employed in nature. Indeed, Dr Belcher says her work was inspired by the way an abalone is genetically programmed to collect calcium from seawater in order to grow its shell. And because the process mimics a natural technique, production can be carried out at room temperature using water-based solutions, unlike conventional methods of making cathodes which are energy-intensive, and involve high temperatures and hazardous chemicals.

The researchers think they can produce a lithium-air battery with an energy density more than twice that of the best lithium-ion cells. That would make a lot of difference to portable electronic products. A typical lithium-ion battery can store some 150 watt-hours of electricity in one kilogram of battery—itself a huge advance over the 45-80 watt-hours of a nickel-cadmium battery, let alone an old-time lead-acid battery’s 30 watt-hours.

But there is some way to go. Lithium-air cells will have drawbacks too, such as a sensitivity to high temperature which can cause their lithium-ion cousins to burst into flames. So far, the researchers have successfully tested their viral material through 50 cycles of charging and recharging, which is encouraging but well short of the hundreds or thousands of cycles expected from a commercial battery. The MIT team could be on the right road, but more work is needed before lithium-air batteries can be used to drive an electric car two or three times farther on a single charge.

From the print edition: Science and technology

 

Stanford B School Guest Lecturer Tony Seba, October 10th, 2:30PM EME 2181

Stanford Graduate School of Business Lecturer in Entrepreneurship, Tony Seba, will be our MGMT 450 Guest Lecturer, Thursday, October 10th, at 2:30PM in EME 2181, speaking on “Entrepreneurship Opportunities in Clean Tech.”   Tony Seba is also an entrepreneur, author, speaker, executive, management consultant and business architect.  Tony will be appearing via live video conference from Stanford University to the MGMT 450 classroom.

Tony Seba: Clean Energy, Economics and Entrepreneurship

May 24th, 2013

Tony Seba is the author of “Solar Trillions – 7 Market and Investment Opportunities in the Emerging Clean-Energy Economy” and “Winner Takes All – 9 Fundamental Rules of High Tech Strategy“. He is a lecturer in entrepreneurship at Stanford University where he teaches entrepreneurship, disruption, and clean energy. He has created and taught the following courses: “Understanding and Leading Market Disruption”,  “Clean Energy – Market and Investment Opportunities“, “Strategic Marketing of High Tech and Cleantech“, “Finance for Marketing, Engineers, and Entrepreneurs“. and “Business and Revenue Models Innovation“, He teaches at top business school around the world such as The Auckland University (New Zealand) Business School. and in-company at some of the world’s top high tech companies such as Google, Inc..

Tony Seba brings 20+ years of solid operating experience in fast-growth high tech and clean tech companies. He was Vice President, Corporate Development at “Utility Scale Solar, Inc.” where he helped the company grow from the garage-stage through growth strategy, fundraising, business development with plant developers and partners. He was previously founder and CEO of PrintNation.com a B2B ecommerce site which he established as the undisputed leader in its market segment, winning such top industry awards as the Upside Hot 100 and the Forbes.com B2B ‘Best of the Web’. Seba led two venture capital rounds raising more than $31 million in funding from well-known venture funds, hired a complete management team, 100+ employees, and managed the development of strategic partnerships with some of the world’s top companies.

Prior to PrintNation, Mr. Seba worked in business development and strategic planning at Cisco Systems and RSA Data Security. Seba has been responsible for the architecture, development, and commercialization of more than two dozen products including Java security, electronic payment technology, sales force automation, computer-aided software engineering and ecommerce infrastructure.

Seba speaks frequently at clean energy, clean tech, entrepreneurship and high tech conferences and company events. He has been featured inComputerWorld, Business Week, Investors Business Daily, Forbes, Fast Company, Success and other media and holds entrepreneurship awards such as BridgeGate’s Top 20 Difference-makers.

Seba is a Global Cleantech Advisor  at Global Technology and Innovation Partners, and is on the advisory boards of Medifirst Systems, and Stanford Society for Entrepreneurship in Latin America. He has recently been on the Board of Directors of the Stanford Alumni Consulting Team and the San Francisco Jazz Organization. He has worked on ACT projects for organizations such as Stanford Office of Technology Licensing, Yerba Buena Center for The Arts and Girls Scouts USA.

Tony Seba holds an M.B.A. from Stanford University Graduate School of Business and a B.S. in Computer Science and Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Quantum Computing Takes Center Stage In Wake of NSA Encryption Cracking

In the late 1990’s while I was with Ascend Communications, I participated in the creation of the “point-to-point tunneling protocol” (PPTP) with engineers at Microsoft and Cisco Systems, now an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) industry standard.  PPTP is the technical means for creating the “virtual private networks” we use at UBC, by encrypting “open” Internet packets with IPSEC 128 bit code, buried in public packets. It was an ingenious solution, enabling private Internet traffic that we assumed would last for a very long time.  It was not to be, as we now know.  Most disturbing, in the 1990’s the US Congress debated giving the government the key to all encryption, which was resoundingly defeated. Now, the NSA appears to have illegally circumvented this prohibition and cracked encryption anyway. But this discussion is not about the political, legal and moral issues, which are significant.  In this post I am more interested in exploring the question: “So now what do we do?” There may be an answer on the horizon, and Canada is already a significant participant in the potential solution.

As it happens, Canada is already at the forefront of quantum computing, a critically important new area of research and development, that has significant future potential in both computing and cryptography.  I have previously written about Vancouver-based D-Wave, which has produced commercial systems that have been purchased by Google and Lockheed Martin Aerospace.  The Institute for Quantum Computing in Waterloo, Ontario is the other major center of quantum computing research in Canada. Without taking a major diversion to explain quantum mechanics and its applications in computing and cryptography, there is a great PBS Nova broadcast, available online, which provides a basic tutorial.  The Economist article below, also does an admirable job of making this area understandable, and the role that the Waterloo research centre is playing in advancing cryptography to an entirely new level.

We need to insure that Canada remains at the forefront of this critically important new technology.

Cryptography

The solace of quantum

Eavesdropping on secret communications is about to get harder

REBLOGGED from The Economist online edition

First published May 25th 2013 

• CRYPTOGRAPHY is an arms race between Alice and Bob, and Eve. These are the names cryptographers give to two people who are trying to communicate privily, and to a third who is trying to intercept and decrypt their conversation. Currently, Alice and Bob are ahead—just. But Eve is catching up. Alice and Bob are therefore looking for a whole new way of keeping things secret. And they may soon have one, courtesy of quantum mechanics.

At the moment cryptography concentrates on making the decrypting part as hard as possible. The industry standard, known as RSA (after its inventors, Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology), relies on two keys, one public and one private. These keys are very big numbers, each of which is derived from the product of the same two prime numbers. Anyone can encrypt a message using the public key, but only someone with the private key can decrypt it. To find the private key, you have to work out what the primes are from the public key. Make the primes big enough—and hunting big primes is something of a sport among mathematicians—and the task of factorising the public key to reveal the primes, though possible in theory, would take too long in practice. (About 40 quadrillion years with the primes then available, when the system was introduced in 1977.)

Since the 1970s, though, the computers that do the factorisation have got bigger and faster. Some cryptographers therefore fear for the future of RSA. Hence the interest in quantum cryptography.

Alice, Bob and Werner, too?

The most developed form of quantum cryptography, known as quantum key distribution (QKD), relies on stopping interception, rather than preventing decryption. Once again, the key is a huge number—one with hundreds of digits, if expressed in the decimal system. Alice sends this to Bob as a series of photons (the particles of light) before she sends the encrypted message. For Eve to read this transmission, and thus obtain the key, she must destroy some photons. Since Bob will certainly notice the missing photons, Eve will need to create and send identical ones to Bob to avoid detection. But Alice and Bob (or, rather, the engineers who make their equipment) can stop that by using two different quantum properties, such as the polarities of the photons, to encode the ones and zeros of which the key is composed. According to Werner Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, only one of these two properties can be measured, so Eve cannot reconstruct each photon without making errors. If Bob detects such errors he can tell Alice not to send the actual message until the line has been secured.

One exponent of this approach is ID Quantique, a Swiss firm. In collaboration with Battelle, an American one, it is building a 700km (440-mile) fibre-optic QKD link between Battelle’s headquarters in Columbus, Ohio, and the firm’s facilities in and around Washington, DC. Battelle will use this to protect its own information and the link will also be hired to other firms that want to move sensitive data around.

QuintessenceLabs, an Australian firm, has a different approach to encoding. Instead of tinkering with photons’ polarities, it changes their phases and amplitudes. The effect is the same, though: Eve will necessarily give herself away if she eavesdrops. Using this technology, QuintessenceLabs is building a 560km QKD link between the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, which organises many of NASA’s unmanned scientific missions, and the Ames Research Centre in Silicon Valley, where a lot of the agency’s scientific investigations are carried out.

A third project, organised by Jane Nordholt of Los Alamos National Laboratory, has just demonstrated how a pocket-sized QKD transmitter called the QKarD can secure signals sent over public data networks to control smart electricity grids. Smart grids balance demand and supply so that electricity can be distributed more efficiently. This requires constant monitoring of the voltage, current and frequency of the grid in lots of different places—and the rapid transmission of the results to control centres. That transmission, however, also needs to be secure in case someone malicious wants to bring the system down.

In their different ways, all these projects are ambitious. All, though, rely on local fixed lines to carry the photons. Other groups of researchers are thinking more globally. To do that means sending quantum-secured data to and from satellites.

At least three groups are working on this: Thomas Jennewein and his team at the Institute for Quantum Computing in Waterloo, Canada; a collaboration led by Anton Zeilinger at the University of Vienna and Jian-Wei Pan at the University of Science and Technology of China; and Alex Ling and Artur Ekert at the Centre for Quantum Technologies in Singapore.

Dr Jennewein’s proposal is for Alice to beam polarisation-encoded photons to a satellite. Once she has established a key, Bob, on another continent, will wait until the satellite passes over him so he can send some more photons to it to create a second key. The satellite will then mix the keys together and transmit the result to Bob, who can work out the first key because he has the second. Alice and Bob now possess a shared key, so they can communicate securely by normal (less intellectually exhausting) terrestrial networks. Dr Jennewein plans to test the idea, using an aircraft rather than a satellite, at some point during the next 12 months.

An alternative, but more involved, satellite method is to use entangled photon pairs. Both Dr Zeilinger’s and Dr Ling’s teams have been trying this.

Entanglement is a quantum effect that connects photons intimately, even when they are separated by a large distance. Measure one particle and you know the state of its partner. In this way Alice and Bob can share a key made of entangled photon pairs generated on a satellite. Dr Zeilinger hopes to try this with a QKD transmitter based on the International Space Station. He and his team have been experimenting with entanglement at ground level for several years. In 2007 they sent entangled photon pairs 144km through the air across the Canary Islands. Dr Ling’s device will test entanglement in orbit, but not send photons down to Earth.

If this sort of thing works at scale, it should keep Alice and Bob ahead for years. As for poor Eve, she will find herself entangled in an unbreakable quantum web.

From the print edition: Science and technology

Aaron Swartz’s Alleged “Crime” And the Business of Breaking the Law

Not surprisingly the groundswell of reaction on the Internet today to the death of Aaron Swartz has focused on the obscene juxtaposition of the charges against Aaron, already dropped by MIT, the potential sentence of 30 years and  fine that he faced, set against the horrendous cases of corporate fraud, money laundering for drug cartels, Iran and Cuba, Dick Fuld of Lehman Brothers walking free.

Below is an eloquent statement of this uneven application of justice and the power of global corporations to use their money to manipulate democracy.

Reblogged from the HBR Blogs Network

Aaron Swartz’s “Crime” and the Business of Breaking the Law

by James Allworth  |  10:30 AM January 14, 2013

It would have been almost impossible to miss the outpouring of grief that accompanied the news over the weekend that Aaron Swartz had committed suicide. If you didn’t know him, Swartz was the founder of Infogami, (later Reddit), one of the creators of the RSS specification (at the age of 14, no less), was deeply involved in the creative commons, and started up the digital activist group Demand Progress (among his other achievements). Tributes flowed in far and wide, and fittingly so — Swartz had accomplished more in his short 26 years than many of us will manage in a lifetime. At the time of his death, he was fighting criminal charges being brought by the Government for downloading academic articles from the online scientific journal store, JSTOR. Such cases are never cheap to defend; one estimate pegged the cost at $1.5M. If found guilty, he could have served as many as 35 years in prison and faced up to $1m in fines.

It was hard to think about this sad turn of events without wondering why the government decided to seek up to 35 years of prison time for a 26-year old who JSTOR had decided to drop charges against, and who, in the words of an expert witness, had done nothing more than be “inconsiderate.” There were a number of very powerful articles written on Swartz and the charges that he faced, and as I read many of them, that question only grew stronger in my mind. The closest I could come to a reasonable explanation was in a tribute written by Swartz’s friend, Professor Lawrence Lessig. Lessig characterized what had happened as a legal and societal form of bullying:
“[Swartz] is gone today, driven to the edge by what a decent society would only call bullying. I get wrong. But I also get proportionality. And if you don’t get both, you don’t deserve to have the power of the United States government behind you.”

That explanation — of an over-zealous prosecutor — certainly seems reasonable at face value. But something kept gnawing at me about that word: “proportionality.” What does it say about us — about what we value — if this is exactly the proportionality of the legal system we have created?

In the past couple of months, there’s been reporting on a pair of crimes in the business world so flagrant as to literally take the breath away. The first of these wasn’t actually that widely reported on — in fact, I only know about it because a friend in the healthcare industry sent along an article on it. It’s a long read, but it’s worth taking the time to do so. It details how a medical device company decided to bypass FDA clinical trials and use bone cement in the spines of humans. Given that the cement wasn’t properly tested, it should come as no big surprise that a number of people died as a result. In sentencing the executives responsible for what happened, the judge described how “what has occurred in this case, in terms of wrongfulness — it’s 11 on a scale of 10.” In fact, the judge, for “the first time in his 25-year career… sentenced someone above the federal guidelines.”

That executive, for his role in what happened, received nine months in jail. (The federal guidelines actually suggested six months for this type of offence, which was not even a felony, but a misdemeanor). One of his fellow executives received a lesser sentence of five months.

And then there’s a case that was much harder to miss: that of HSBC, and their foray into the world of money laundering for drug cartels:

Despite the fact that HSBC admitted to laundering billions of dollars for Colombian and Mexican drug cartels (among others) and violating a host of important banking laws (from the Bank Secrecy Act to the Trading With the Enemy Act), Breuer and his Justice Department elected not to pursue criminal prosecutions of the bank, opting instead for a “record” financial settlement of $1.9 billion, which as one analyst noted is about five weeks of income for the bank.

Lay those two cases down beside that of a 26-year old kid who did the online equivalent of checking out too many books out of the library. For doing that, Aaron Swartz was initially charged with four felonies. The prosecutors in the Synthes case agreed to charge the executives only with one misdemeanor each. In the instance of HSBC, they used their discretion to avoid pursuing criminal charges altogether. In Swartz’s case, the government decided to use that same discretion to bolster its initial four felony charges with a further nine — hence the possibility of over three decades of jail time and a $1M fine. Now, Aaron had only been charged — if justice had prevailed, it could have all been thrown out in court — but even in that circumstance, he would have still been roughly $1.5 million out of pocket just defending himself. Those HSBC executives never even got to that point.

I actually had the opportunity to talk with Aaron online a few weeks ago; partly as a result of an article that I wrote for HBR about corruption and its effect on innovation. Looking at the three cases above, I can’t help but see similar symptoms seeping into the justice system. I simply don’t know how else to explain the huge disparity in how justice was sought in these very different cases — other than regulatory capture. It seems you can get away with laundering money for the drug cartels, so long as you’ve been generous with the those responsible for appointing district attorneys; or better yet, if your industry has paid to undo all the regulation that prevents you from getting too big to fail. Similarly, when your lobby has been helping Congress draft the laws that govern food, drugs, and cosmetics, you can make sure that the federal sentencing guidelines are only six months should you breach the responsible corporate officer doctrine. This in turn means you can inject unsafe cement into people’s spines with relative impunity (apparently, those in the healthcare industry were actually surprised when the officers were sentenced to jail, even if it was for only a few months. One of the convicted executives went so far as to ask the judge to delay the beginning of his sentence until after the holidays). But woe betide you if, in the name of openness and sharing human knowledge, you decide to download academic journals. Because that sounds a lot like piracy — and we all know how much has been spent to stamp that scourge out.

It seems to me that there’s a new way of thinking about proportionality. Unfortunately, it’s being determined much less by any notion of justice than it is by a broken political system corrupted by the influence of money.

I really don’t like it, but I just can’t see any other way of explaining how else it could happen.
I’d like to take this opportunity to extend my heartfelt condolences to the family and friends of Aaron Swartz. If you’re interested in doing something to fix some of these problems, I’d encourage you to find out more about Rootstrikers and Demand Progress, two organizations that Aaron was deeply involved in.

More blog posts by James Allworth

More on: Ethics, Government

JAMES ALLWORTH

James Allworth is the coauthor of How Will You Measure Your Life?. He has worked as a Fellow at the Forum for Growth and Innovation at Harvard Business School, at Apple, and Booz & Company. Connect with him on Twitter at @jamesallworth. To receive an email when he posts, click here.

 

In Memoriam: Aaron Swartz, Internet Activist, RSS Pioneer, and Co-Founder of Reddit

Aaron Swartz, Internet Visionary Has Left Us

UPDATE

Tweet from (Sir) Tim Berners-Lee on the death of Aaron Swartz”  “Aaron dead. World wanderers, we have lost a wise elder. Hackers for right, we are one down. Parents all, we have lost a child. Let us weep.” And the web wept.

Today the blogosphere and media have lit up with tributes and obituaries to Aaron Swartz: not least of these include The Economist Magazine “Babbage” editorial page, and The Harvard Business Review blog

Read more, Babbage, The Economist:  http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2013/01/remembering-aaron-swartz?fsrc=nlw|newe|1-14-2013|4609454|34901933|NA

 Read more, HBR blog:   http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2013/01/aaron_swartzs_crime_and_the_bu.html

ORIGINAL POST

Only 26 years old, Aaron Swartz took his own life late last week.  Swartz was an Internet intellectual giant, recognized as such since his early teenage years..  We have lost a second generation Internet visionary..someone who could have helped us get to the next level of The Global Village..

At the age of 14, Swartz was credited with inventing RSS, known as “rich site summary,” a format for delivering to users content from sites that change constantly, such as news pages and blogs. We all use it.

The problem was that the powers that want corporate control the Internet did not like Aaron.. They want us to pay big corporations big bucks and they see the Internet as a threat to their power.  I personally view Swartz’ suicide as an existential act of immense courage, making the ultimate statement with his life, screaming at us that we need to “wake the fuck up”  as Samuel L. Jackson screamed at us in his viral video, during the US Presidential campaign.

Swartz faced trouble in July 2011, when he was indicted by a federal grand jury of wire fraud, computer fraud and other charges related to allegedly stealing millions of academic articles and journals from a digital archive at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

According to the federal indictment, Swartz – who was a fellow at Harvard University’s Edmond J Safra Center for Ethics – used MIT’s computer networks to steal more than 4 million articles from JSTOR, an online archive and journal distribution service. JSTOR did not press charges against Swartz after the digitised copies of the articles were returned, according to media reports at the time.  So why did the US Attorney insist on driving Aaron to commit suicide?

Swartz, who pleaded not guilty to all counts, faced 35 years in prison and a $1 million fine if convicted. He was released on bond. His trial was scheduled to start later this year.  Many legal scholars who have studied the case,  have described the US federal prosecution as a travesty, and out of all proportion to the facts..

Most importantly, if the United States views the Internet as a strategic national security resource, they completely fucked up by forcing the suicide of one of its most important new geniuses. You can’t get more fucked up than that. 

On Saturday, online tributes to Swartz flooded across cyberspace. “Aaron had an unbeatable combination of political insight, technical skill and intelligence about people and issues,” Cory Doctorow, Canadian blogger and science fiction writer, co-editor of the weblog Boing Boing, wrote on the site. Doctorow wrote that Swartz had “problems with depression for many years.”  Depression, mood swings and even bipolar disorder are commonly associated with extremely bright people.

We lost Steve Jobs.. Now we have lost Aaron as well.  He could have been our next generation Marshall McLuhan, showing us the way…. But it was not to happen.  I am so angry I could spit.