Science Thursday

Jamie Harris

Jamie Harris is Class of 2012 at UVa,  a Rodman Scholar in Chemical Engineering, and, among other things,  RodSquad Co-Director. (Rod Squad is a program started with a grant from Lockheed Martin that trains Scholars about sustainability and home energy conservation, then sends them out into the Charlottesville area to conduct home energy audits.)

I'm also happy to report that Jamie recently jumped into the WMRA community conversation on Facebook. Which is where our paths crossed. Or perhaps I should say e-crossed.

Over the summer, I learned, Jamie did research on algae processing for use in bio-fuels. And when I heard about this, I have to tell you, my Inner Green Person sat up and barked. What a great idea/theory -- however it's termed at this stage.

 I asked Jamie for more information about his summer work, and he sent the following.

Algae uses a fraction of the nutrients and "field space" of other ethanol producers (such as soybeans and corn). Algae also effectively takes CO2 out of wastewater and uses it to grow. This means algae is an effective wastewater treatment option for large scale factories, but this isn't happening yet. Research at UVa and elsewhere is trying to show that it is a feasible and effective option.

Once the algae has grown, it can be converted to biodiesel via the same reaction that turns corn into ethanol, soybean oil into biodiesel, etc. This is where my research lies-- finding the best type of algae and set of reaction conditions-- especially selecting the correct catalyst and designing that catalyst-- to make this reaction as efficient and cost effective as possible. It was a very exciting summer, getting myself acquainted with the lab and the reaction. Unfortunately, as a third-year chemical engineering student, my course load is quite rigorous and I don't have much time for research thus far.

Hopefully algae pans out sometime in the next decade. Who knows. It is better than corn or soybeans for biofuels, potentially/ given the opportunity. In my opinion.

Hmmmmm.

I got busy this morning and dug around on the internet to see what else was out there about the feasibility of  bio-fuels from algae. And found many references to a cautionary study published by UVa researchers in January 2010 in Environmental Science and Technology that indicated the process, as it's currently understood, is not yet viable.

In this work, the impacts associated with algae production were determined using a stochastic life cycle model and compared with switchgrass, canola, and corn farming. The results indicate that these conventional crops have lower environmental impacts than algae in energy use, greenhouse gas emissions, and water regardless of cultivation location. 

The study's abstract also said there is still hope for the algae-into-bio-fuel process.

Only in total land use and eutrophication potential do algae perform favorably. The large environmental footprint of algae cultivation is driven predominantly by upstream impacts, such as the demand for CO₂ and fertilizer. To reduce these impacts, flue gas and, to a greater extent, wastewater could be used to offset most of the environmental burdens associated with algae. To demonstrate the benefits of algae production coupled with wastewater treatment, the model was expanded to include three different municipal wastewater effluents as sources of nitrogen and phosphorus. Each provided a significant reduction in the burdens of algae cultivation, and the use of source-separated urine was found to make algae more environmentally beneficial than the terrestrial crops.

There's not much else besides this one cautionary study out there on the alga-into-bio-fuel process, yet I somehow take comfort in knowing – through Facebook and thanks to Jamie Harris – that the research into it is ongoing. I find it a relief – as we struggle through this staggeringly destructive, lingering drought – to know hopeful scientists and engineers are out there, working away, trying to figure out what we can do to salvage this sweet old world.

Martha note: I've asked Jamie to ask anyone he knows who's got any more information about this process to comment. You got anything to add?

Facebook: The new smoke break?

We are born into this world with a finite amount of time to do both what we need to do and what we want to do.  And a lot of us are either needing or wanting to spend a tremendous amount of that allotted time on Facebook. Including me -- of course -- as WMRA's official Facebook Maven and Fan Wrangler.

Hmmmm. . .

This was posted recently on CNN Tech.

We already know that Facebook is the web's biggest time sink. If you look at the average amount of time (according to Nielsen) users spend on the social network, Facebook is a clear winner over sites such as Google or Yahoo.

Now, according to comScore, Facebook is also first when it comes to the total amount of time users are spending on the site.

In August, U.S. web users spent 41.1 million minutes on Facebook, which was about 9.9 percent of their entire web-surfing time in that month.

In this same period, people spent 39.8 million minutes on all of Google's sites, and those include another huge online timesink -- YouTube.

comScore puts Yahoo in third place, with U.S. web users spending 37.7 million minutes on its sites, which was about 9.1 percent of their web surfing time in August.

The numbers are even more impressive when you consider that Facebook had just overtaken Yahoo in July, and in August last year U.S. web surfers had spent less than 5 percent of their online time on the social networking service.

Still, it hardly comes as a surprise: Facebook has been growing steadily in the last couple of years, and in July it announced it had over 500 million active users.

If Facebook keeps growing, a year from now Google may find itself far behind Facebook when it comes to web users' minutes.

Reading this, and thinking about my own Facebooking, I had a little mini-epiphany; mini in that it was not about anything approaching cosmic, but an epiphany, nonetheless, in that it was "a sudden, intuitive perception of, or insight into, the reality or essential meaning of something."

Facebook, I realized, is the new smoke break.

Allow me to illustrate my mini-epiphany with a personal story.

My first job in journalism was at the now-defunct Houston Post. I was hired as a researcher for "Action Line," a consumer column. My office was a cubbyhole off  the main newsroom --  an enormous, window-less space with rows of wooden desks, on which sat black, upright Underwood typewriters, and over which  hung a pall of cigarette smoke.  My own office, sad to say, puffed when I opened the door.

I was 19 and smoked at least a pack-and-a-half  a day.

Why?

Well first of all, I was born attached to cigarettes, straight bourbon, and black coffee. All but the black coffee are gone, but I did enjoy the other two mightily for a time. Until, that is, I came to grips with the sad truth that bourbon and cigarettes were, for me, equally poisonous.

Cigarettes in those days, I think, functioned as my think breaks.

Let me explain.

I have always worked in herks and jerks, periods of intense concentration followed by periods of noodling around.  Back during my  Houston Post days, everybody I knew smoked. And viewed it as a legitimate and pleasant way to goof-off for a minute or two.

Isn't that the need Facebook fills today? It certainly does for me.  I mean, when I want a reason to put off doing what I need to be doing for a minute or two, I jump on Facebook?

Of course, as WMRA's official Facebook Maven, it's my job, but still . . .

Facebook as the new smoke break. I like it . . .

You with me, or what?

Of course, cigarettes are highly addictive. Anyone, besides me, ever wonder whether Facebook might be, as well?

Learning from last week . . .

This morning as I sat down to post WMRA's first Facebook question/comment of the day, it was with the knowledge that there were potentially 500 million other people out there doing the same thing.

I was not surprised to learn that Facebook had passed this milestone. The site works so well on so many levels -- FB can inform and invite discussion (which is what I hope the WMRA page does), it keeps our mobile population connected, and it can be simply silly and fun.

Anyone else remember the hula hoop craze of 1958 when 20 million Whamo hoops sold in six months? It pales in comparison, doesn't it? And the Beatles had only sold a paltry 100 million albums by February of 1965.

There may be all kinds of concern about FB and privacy, but there's absolutely no argument that FB is a huge part of our internet life in this, the Internet Age.

What I used the WMRA Facebook page for this morning, however, was to post about something that is anything but fun; WikiLeaks' posting of what the New York Times calls "The War Logs:" 6 years (2004-2009) of leaked classified documents that fill us in on what's going on in Afghanistan.

Kevin Frayer/Associated Press

Now, good luck getting onto the WikiLeaks site, itself. I tried and failed all the time I was writing this blog post.  The site, my internet provider told me, was too busy. But despite my American propensity to think I need to know everything right now, I'm willing to wait my turn on this one, because I need time to think and there's a lot of information out there posted by reliable sources who have been able to access the site.

 For example, the Wall Street Journal writes this morning,

There appears to be evidence of war crimes in the leaked documents, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said in a news conference in London on Monday according to the Associated Press. "It is up to a court to decide really if something in the end is a crime. That said ... there does appear to be...."

And then there's disturbing information about Pakistan as reported in the New York Times:

. . . [Leaked documents] suggest that Pakistan, an ostensible ally of the United States, allows representatives of its spy service to meet directly with the Taliban in secret strategy sessions to organize networks of militant groups that fight against American soldiers in Afghanistan, and even hatch plots to assassinate Afghan leaders.

It strikes me that it's one thing to rant about suspected dark deeds in this ugly war; it's another to have them detailed on our computer screens by, it appears, those who have first-hand knowledge of them. We now have to stop ranting and start thinking, assessing, and, most importantly, reading. It is, in some ways, yet another end of innocence. "National security" in a sense protected us from having to deal with all this difficult information.

There's a lot more on this story out there on the internet this morning, and it's not just about the documents, themselves. There's White House National Security Adviser James Jones' strong statement about "national security," condemning WikiLeaks' release of the documents as "irresponsible." Yet, the "Greenslade Blog" of the British newspaper, The Guardian asks:

Do we believe factual reports by US soldiers about the killing of civilians is worthless? Do we really think that hard information about the increasing strength of the Taliban should be covered up? Is it of no consequence that there is new and more obvious evidence about Pakistani and Iranian aid for the Taliban?

Do we believe? Do we really think? Is it?

Well, please, please, please don't answer that. Yet.

Last week's news kerfuffle was caused by the misuse of a Shirley Sherrod speech by He Who Shall Not Be Named (yes, that conservative blogger, who's been named enough, already) and the administration's subsequent overreaction to it.  It was fueled on the internet, in large part I would suspect by us 500 million FB users reacting too quickly to what we read on the internet.

I hope we learned from this disaster that we need to take time to be informed before we form our opinions. And to shy away from the opinions of those who do not appear to be reliably sourcing their material.

So, may we all have more than our customary patience while we wait in line at WikiLeaks. Might I suggest amusing yourself on Facebook, chatting with friends about how long they've been waiting . . .

Note: I just went back to insert a link to WMRA's Facebook page and realized I had done what I just blogged against doing: I had solicited an immediate response from you to the WikiLeaks story. So, I've dope-slapped myself, and I do promise to try to do better.

What do we want from Facebook . . .

Change has long been recognized as difficult.  W.H. Auden (left)  in "The Age of Anxiety" opines we would rather be ruined than changed.

Since you're reading this blog and I'm writing it, it's easy to assume we're aware (and most likely grappling with) the change in our social networking universe occasioned by the launch of  Facebook Connect. Touted by Facebook developers as "the next iteration of Facebook Platform that allows users to 'connect' their Facebook identity, friends and privacy to any site."

ABC news explained the changes this way:

On thousands of sites, including ABCNews.com, a "social plug-in" now lets users "like" content and see what their Facebook friends have liked, directly from those sites.

On three sites piloting an "instant personalization" feature, a user's profile information and friend list are automatically read by the site and used to shape the user's experience. On music site Pandora, for example, you can see what your Facebook friends like to listen to. On Yelp, you can see which restaurants they've reviewed.

In the wake of this change, there has been considerable alarm expressed about Facebook in general and Facebook privacy issues in particular. There has also been considerable applause for the changes accompanied by accusations that those concerned  are over 35 and thus suffering from old fogeyism.

Facebook responded to user concerns through The New York Times' blog "Bits." SFGate, the on-line home of  The San Francisco Chronicle summed up what Elliot Schrage (right), Facebook's vice president for public policy, had to say this way:

• Facebook is very sorry that the changes confused people, and it will do a better job ensuring that its privacy settings are more transparent in the future.
• Facebook is not at all sorry about the substance of the changes. No one is being forced to join Facebook, and no one who does join is being forced to list their interests. "If you're not comfortable sharing, don't."

Mr. Schrage's on-line session was not well received. A Facebook page formed to protest the changes has attracted 95,000 members in 16 days. The Register (independent news, views, opinions and reviews on the latest in the IT industry; offices in London, Edinburgh, San Francisco, etc.) reports this morning that Facebook has called a "privacy crisis" meeting to deal with user grumblings bordering on rebellion.

The "all hands meeting" of Facebook staffers is due to take place at 4pm PDT on Thursday. It follows a critically panned attempt by Elliot Schrage, Facebook’s vice president for public policy, to justify its privacy stance in an online Q&A with readers of The New York Times earlier this week.

The unofficial allfacebook.com blog speculates that the meeting may result in the social network taking an opt-in approach to features that potentially expose users' private details, photos and opinions more widely. A temporary suspension of the recently introduced “Instant Personalization” service that involves the sharing of profile details with selected third-party websites is also a possibility.

Controlling individual privacy settings on Facebook has become an arcane process over recent weeks, as this visualization of the 150+ privacy options the site offers by the NYT illustrates. 

This all interests me so much, mainly because our society in general seems to court celebrity, exposure, notice, and on-line interaction. Has our romance with notice begun to sour? Has Facebook gotten too powerful and uppity? Is it the obvious tie-ins with Facebook ads that bothers us?

What, exactly do we want from Facebook?