Oops

Well, I didn't keep the blog up at all, so probably no one is checking anymore. I've been in Zurich since Sunday; it was really sunny and hot when we got here, and we spent a whole day doing nothing, which we all needed. A few pictures on facebook here. We rented a paddleboat with a slide and went around the lake, including sliding into the giant fountain, and it was awesome! Here's a video:


Zurich is really nice, although not quite as exciting as London or Paris. And it's expensive! A Swiss Franc is about on par with the US$, and some sample prices are:
Bottle of beer in a bar: $7
Pizza for one hungry person: $20-$25
Movie: $20
A ride on the tram: $4
Sandwich meat: $10-$35/pound
Some crappy cafeteria food at ETH (the university): $10-$12

Of course, I was told the minimum wage in Switzerland is 3,500 CHF a month, so it's no wonder that things are expensive here. Also, the maximum income tax is 10%, and if you're really rich you pay less, because you can negotiate it!

We continue to be beaten into submission by lectures, although they have slowed down a lot (we had another lecture on climate change and the insurance industry today by someone from SwissRe today, which I skipped). We're spending a lot more time on the business plan now, which is actually less exciting than it sounds (brainstorming marketing strategies, filling in financial Excel spreadsheets, making wild assumptions like how many houses we'll sell services to in the first year, etc). Everyone is kind of burned out, we didn't really develop our ideas until the 4th week or so, and so it feels really rushed. It would be more fun if I thought I might actually start this business, but I know that's pretty much not going to happen. First of all, our initial market is southern France, and I don't speak French. Second, none of us have any experience or money. It may be an idea that could be deployed in other areas like the Netherlands, or even the US, although the US has a lot of people doing what we're doing already. The best thing about it is the experience of working in a team to develop an actual business plan, and because it's similar to the idea I worked on last quarter (household power in India), there may be some ideas that cross-apply. We did a feasibility study last quarter for that idea, and will write the actual business plan this coming semester.

The best parts of this trip have been meeting entrepreneurs; we met a guy in London who took this old plastic technology, Dupont makes this plastic sheeting that acts as a vapor barrier for things like railroad ties, and it pervaporates water. This guy was in a meeting with some Dupont guy and thought it was cool, so he made it into a pipe and uses it for super low water use irrigation systems. The best part is that only the water pervaporates through (in most cases), so you can use salt water (they've used water 100 times saltier than the ocean) or water with all sorts of toxins in it- you just have to make sure to move enough water through that the pipe doesn't get coated and clog. He's just getting started, but has several pilot projects going, mostly being sponsored by governments in the Arabia region. The website is here, which he built on his own using the built-in Apple software (it kind of shows).

London

Shit, I don't have any time to write about this... we formed teams, I got 4 people to join my idea of Green Homes - "You save money. You save the planet. We do the work." The idea is on the wiki if you want to search for it! It's basically copying www.1bog.org but adding other types of generation besides PV, and also adding energy efficiency services, and then implementing the idea in Europe (probably the UK first, but we need to do a bit more research first). My team is two French girls and a French guy (somehow the nationalities ended up grouping, although I'm not with the other American), and a Dutch guy. Madeleine studies atmospheric science, Claire environmental science, Etienne mechanical and chemical engineering, and Frank business and engineering. I would describe the folks in my group as on the quiet side, but they're bright and motivated too. They are also more technical-minded, and I anticipate having to coax them to not worry about which particular mix of technology we use in a home, and focus more on how to sell our services.



We have been meeting the rich and famous in our London lectures... one of the 5 guys who started the European Climate Exchange with $20 million in seed capital and sold it the other day for $400 million... he couldn't get the smile off his face. Nicholas Stern, of the infamous Stern Report, which attempted a cost-benefit analysis of dealing with climate change. We also went to Lloyd's of London and heard about the insurance industry's response to climate change, and got a tour of their big crazy Geiger-esque building. The street in front of our (crappy circa 1970's) student residence is filled with Bentley after Porsche after Jaguar after Audi (and an odd Ferrari).

Today (Wednesday) we went to another research farm, Rothamsted, home to the longest-running agricultural experiments in the world (150-odd years), and the largest agricultural research center in the world. It was started by John Bennet Lawes, who invented artificial phosphate fertilizers, and then started a farm to prove that they helped plants grow faster. They've been experimenting on the effects of fertilizers, crop strands, herbi/fungi/pesti-cides on yields, and today they examine ecology more, like what happens to biodiversity when pH changes, or when you add fertilizer (natural biodiversity at the farm is 40 species per plot; add fertilizer and the most adept plants crowd out the others, and diversity drops to 3-4 species; drop the pH and only a few species, 1-2, can cope). It reminded me of the oceans, how the northern oceans are incredibly productive but rely on a few key species (who 'crowd out' the others, just like the plants), and the tropics are incredibly diverse but not particularly productive. And I think maybe humans are the ultimate species, we've gotten so good and providing resources to ourselves that we're steadily crowding out all the other species.

Rothamsted also maintains the UK willow depository; they grow several hundred species and maintain a seed bank. They also cross-breed to get higher-yielding strains for use in co-firing with coal. They also look at how to use all parts of a plant for something at large scales, like a big bio-refinery. Another area of research is the effects of 'bio-char' on soil; bio-char is where you pyrolyze (burn w/o oxygen) biomass, and it makes this big chunk of stable carbon, which you put in the soil where it stores the carbon and improves the soil - although people don't really know by how much, but since it stores carbon people are very excited about it right now. We saw a brief Ph.D. student present her findings on how areas with sugar cane/ethanol production in Brazil are better off than those areas without, but it wasn't clear whether sugar cane production improved the areas, or the areas were chosen for production because they were better to start with (and of course there wasn't time for questions). Rothamstead also does research on crop disease and food security, like if plants start blooming 2 months earlier by 2050 because of climate change, what happens disease-wise? Similarly, they examine how to decrease CO2 production in agriculture, e.g. if you add fungicides you need less N fertilizer to attain the same yields, and N fertilizer production and application is by far the biggest contributor to GHG production in agriculture.

Alright, I realize that was probably boring but I have to go to dinner in 10 minutes and I'm just trying to unpack what we heard today a bit. We also had a super boring lecture on market research which lasted two hours and seemed like a whole lot of common sense, which is disappointing since it was from the dean of the 3rd ranked business school in Europe. I need to start bringing my laptop to the lectures so I can multi-task. I seriously don't know when we will write a business plan; they went way over the top with the lecture schedule.

I posted some London pictures (and more Paris ones) on facebook, but I won't reproduce them here because Blogger is seriously shit at posting pictures and it gives me a headache. Paris is here and London is here (link to FB, no log-in or membership required).

Last day in Paris

So it's the last night in Paris, and we're going out for a fancy dinner in a few minutes. It'll be a nice change of pace, since the cafeteria food we get on the campus is really quite disgusting. But to totally disprove that we've been eating a lot of small quantities of shit food in the last two weeks, here's some nice pictures:

This is me eating salted caramel ice cream at the best ice creamery in Paris, followed by us (Richard, then Madeleine and Charlotte, then me) eating falafal at the best falafal place in Paris. Well, the best when the long line is in front of them, apparently sometimes the one accross the street is "the best." But the falafal was really, really awesome, roasted eggplants and spicy sauce in addition to what you would expect (cucumbers, tzatziki, cabbage, etc). The ice cream was awesome too.

Today we went to the Grignon farm, a working research farm which is part of the Agro Paris Tech university, which I think they said is the oldest agricultural university in France. The farm looks for ways for conventional farms to lower their environmental impact, such as no-till farming, rotating in legumes (to fix nitrogen), or growing miscanthus on marginal land to produce energy. It's not organic farming, and looks to help farmers improve their methods using methods which are low burdens on the farmer. Organic farming is complex, and is quite a commitment for conventional farmers, which are 90% of the farmers in France.

We pitched ideas this week to form teams for business plan formation; I pitched stealingthe 1 Block Off the Grid idea and expanding it to include more energy technologies, and also energy efficiency. I think there is interest in making it happen. 50 people and 50 ideas, it'll be a strange scramble to form teams by Monday. Some of the ideas are really good, some not as good; some have been developed quite a bit, some were developed the day before the pitch. There is a strange contrast between the business folks and the science folks - the science folks can be such communists! Lots of support for things like the government rationing carbon emissions, and doing just about everything else to fix the climate mess. I didn't think that was the point of a program on entrepreneurship. Anyways, I have to get ready for dinner.

I just realized I never published this, I was going to add to it but I already started a new post. We have very little time for anything - they are giving us way to many lectures, which we basically do from 8am to 6pm every day, and are expected to be writing a business plan and doing other reading apart from that. Even the lectures are too packed time-wise for us to have good Q&A sessions, because we're always behind, which is a shame, because we're a smart group of people with great experience and we have good questions!

Da Weekend Come

Saturday we went to Versailles. It was pretty awesome, but we spent too much time in the gardens, mostly because it started pouring and we had to hide inside for a bit. So we only had 45 minutes for the castle, but it was pretty spectacular. I want to be a king and squeeze the peasants dry someday... pictures on my facebook profile.

Sunday we went to the Centre Pompidou, a modern art museum, where we got to see two awesome exhibitions, Dreamlands and Lucian Freud. The first is titled in reference to the Coney Island theme park of the same name, and details humanity's obsession with having these Ultimate Designs of fantasylands, and how they have shaped our urban fabric. Coney Island in the early 20th century is one example, where the skyscraper was realized and high-speed elevators utilized for the first time. The exhibition credits this with shaping the skyscraper obsession that would overtake New York. Los Vegas is another, and so is Dubai and EPCOT (the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow). It was a great exhibition and had lots of multimedia displays, including video from the end of the Truman show, abandoned movie sets in Rome, and Walt Disney hucking the EPCOT idea to investors (with swamps on either side, they won't need a fence to keep out trespassers!).

I agree with the main point of the exhibit, which is that not only have these creations shaped the way in which we think about leisure, but also that "they have also become realities: pastiche, copy and artifice now provide the environment in which real life takes place, their normality dissolving the boundary between dream and reality." The only thing is that, like dreams, close examination reveals the strange unreality of these products, and living among them, in fantasy, ultimately destroys our real world and our souls because we fetishize the escapism. Las Vegas is a great example of this - a whole town built around the fantasy of easy money and loose sex, and incredible wonders of the world all in one spot. The trouble is its all fake, but because we want it to be real so badly, we get caught up in the hype, and forget how and why we should build REAL cities and REAL places to live. Las Vegas offends me, not my sensibilities but my senses, my eyes and ears. It hurts to be in unless you're drunk and forget that it's all just cheap plaster board. With the right mind it can be fun for a weekend, but even that is a stretch, and the city certainly doesn't deserve its exhaulted status in movies and pop culture.

But the thing is, we're such suckers for a good story, and Las Vegas tells a good story. Radiolab has a show about how not just once, but thrice Americans got suckered into believeing that the radio show War of the Worlds was real. And as they say in crowd management, the problem isn't the 10% of the people that spook easily - it's the 80% that spook when they see the first 10% freak out. One town's mayor even sent the national guard to the area where the attack was supposedly taking place, all but guaranteeing the rest of the town believed the attack was real (it's a good episode, you should listen to it). But the reason they talk about is that we are culturally and genetically programmed to listen and pay attention to stories - it's how we shared information for thousands if not tens of thousands of years (clever little communicators that we are). So it makes sense that we keep building shit like Dubai, even though it's kind of dumb and bad for us outside the sense of pure amusement, and destroys (ironically) the very experiences we crave. One photographic exhibit had accompanying text discussing how the iconic travel photograph of XX, such as "me in front of the Eiffel tower" has simultaneously universalized and destroyed the whole concept of travel and new cultures. As a a frequent traveler, I'm sad to say I agree. And now here's me in front of the Eiffel tower:

And even better is to put the Eiffel tower next to the pyramids next to a giant freaky Circus Circus, a la Vegas, right?? Right.

The other exhibition was of work from the painter Lucian Freud, which I also really enjoyed. I like the way he paints faces; Freud says that his goal is for his paintings to be not representations, like a photograph, but more like an actor portraying a person, sometimes intensifying the reality - which is exactly how Freud describes the objective of his work. He paints many nudes, although he prefers the word "naked," because he is interested in the human body "in all its rawness," and not the typical "artistic nude." His paintings seem to observe and meditate on the human body, but not celebrate it. Perhaps his fondness of drawing naked bodies makes sense, for he also states that he seeks to make his paint "like flesh." The bodies do seem real; one portrait of a fat naked woman laying on a chair, breast cupped in her hand, brought the reality of the body home enough to me to wonder what it would be like to have all that extra flesh. I couldn't imagine it, and it seemed so strange, but I liked the way the painting made me consider the body anew (then again, women might see Freud's portraits of men and wonder what it's like to have a big weird dangly penis, but I have no problem understanding that. I guess we all have our "normal"). I also liked how for perhaps the first time, I approached paintings to inches to examine the brush strokes. Somehow the work of Freud seemed particularly amazing in its ability to take small clumps of paint, just color mashed onto canvas really, and do it in a way that when examined from afar, seems not just like a person, but an enhanced version of a person. A pen-and-ink of a tree made me think the same thing. I'm going to stop writing now, because my utilitarian style just feels utterly useless to describe art! Below are some examples to get you started:

Ooh, the weekend!

Remember when I said, 'Paris is nice'? That was a bit taciturn because I haven't really SEEN any of it yet. Our accommodations, on the Cite Universitaire campus, are pretty nice, although occasionally brutally hot (it's by the highway, so at night you can choose between hot and noisy). My room is about 4x8 meters, with a big chunk taken up by a big lime green box that hides a closet and toilet/shower. Very modern. The rest of the campus makes me feel like a freshman again, it's very American in style - a big chunk fenced off from the rest of southern Paris, lots of big nice brick buildings, lawns of students playing sports, and nights of loud music and the stench of stale beer and pot wafting from dorm rooms. I've only taken one trip into the city so far; on Thursday night we went to an Erasmus (European exchange program) party on a boat by the Eiffel tower. The party was crap: the dance floor was below deck and the windows didn't open, and a tall Dutchman would hit his head on the ceiling; the music was bad and beers were 6 euro a bottle (US$7.50). But the view was nice. Of course I didn't have my camera, but of course I'll try and be by the Eiffel tower again before I leave (the world cup final is broadcast there tomorrow. That octopus predicted Spain, but I'll be rooting for the Netherlands!). Also, we're heading to Versailles later today. Maybe a museum tomorrow morning, but does it have to be the Louvre? I'm feeling finding one perhaps slightly less obvious that I might actually be able to get through in half a day!

Yesterday we went to University de Versailles Saint Quentin, which has a master program in management of eco-innovation. We saw the graduation presentations of two groups, and had some lectures on what an entrepreneur is (a calculated risk-taker, probably well-educated, probably but not necessarily starting their business from experience in an industry), and eco-innovation in particular. The graduation presentations were interesting but not awesome; they were about how to turn the city of Saint Quentin into a leading center of eco-innovation (something the French gov is on about right now), but neither group really convinced me they would be able to do what they said they wanted to do. One group in particular seemed to have nice ideas but no feasible way to implement them, or any clear over-arching vision. The other group had more in the way of budgets, time tables, alternative plans, and milestones, but left a lot of questions about their proposals (for example, they propose switching to a service economy, e.g. you rent your TV instead of own it, but it wasn't clear how this would be implemented, why people would like it, or why it would be better for the environment). To give the benefit of the doubt though, we were supposed to receive their written reports beforehand, but we didn't. Presumably, these would reflect more accurate and in-depth research than a 20 minute presentation.

The eco-entrepreneurship lecture was from Keith Culver, a Scottish-Canadian and the head of the program at UVSQ, and was part call to arms (the world could end by 2030 due to rising pressure from population, and on energy, food and water resources), and party an exploration of what eco-entrepreneurship is (basically, whatever you want it to be. The EU doesn't define it, but knows they like it, and that seems to be the general theme). Basically he was trying to tell us that we should be coming up with big, regime-changing, revolutionary ideas instead of incremental ones. Maybe I agree, but there seems to be an inversely-proportional relationship between how revolutionary an idea is and how likely it is to succeed. What's better, an idea with a one-in-a-million chance of success that would be really awesome, or one with a 1 in 2 chance of success that is only an incremental improvement for the environment and in delivery of value? Also, Keith lost all credibility in my eyes when he first said that using the tax system to internalize environmental costs was a 'moral hazard' because the rich could still pay to get what they wanted (he said instead we should be pursuing cultural change to ideas such as 'stuff makes us happy'), but then said that we should seriously be exploring the idea of population control and didn't understand that students got offended when he said that. Is he fucking serious?? Rightly so, the Indians in the group WERE offended, probably because they learn in school about India's program of forced sterilization of the poor in the 1970's under Sanjay Gandhi. This program was so reprehensible that it is difficult to encourage voluntary family planning in India today, so it was pretty much a resounding failure. In fact, I doubt there has ever been a non-voluntary effort of population control that I would consider consistent with my own moral code or the ideals of liberal democracy. Also, I think it's worth noting that the population issue is solving itself with remarkable speed, because the world is getting richer, which means people don't need to rely on their kids for sustenance in old age, and because more people can afford basic health care, meaning more children live to adolescence, and in response family sizes drop. Basically, once per-capita GDP reaches around $10,000, family size drops to near replacement rate, and many places in the world are reaching this threshold (e.g. Mexico, Chile, South Korea, Mauritius. Notice also that these are countries which liberalized trade and pursued export-led economic growth). This is visualized nicely by the Gapminder program, if that link doesn't work go here and put crude births on one axis and GDP on the other. This program is really awesome, and for a good introduction (and to learn a thing or two about how much the world has changed in the last 20 years, how rich many people have actually become, and what an amazing impact this has had on quality of life in most places around the globe, check out the founders TED talk). Because people have failed to realize the synergies between these factors, the UN has had to continually revise its estimates of world population in 2050: in 1970, they estimated a median of 16 billion, in 1990 they estimated 12 billion, and today the median estimate is 9.5 billion. And to tie back to taxes, I would assert that the tax system is essentially a structural expression of what a society values and does not value, because if you tax something you get less of it, and if you subsidize it you get more of it. Tax systems today don't necessarily reflect this because they built up over time because of a need for government revenue, but if we all sat down and though about what should get taxed and what shouldn't, I think we would see less tax on work and more tax on environmental damages. So instead of being a moral hazard, the tax code should be seen as an expression of social values. Not only that, I would point out that altering the tax code and trying to change cultural values (e.g. 'stuff makes us happy') are not mutually exclusive.

Pictures!

From Ecole Polytechnique. Don't really have time to write, but today was fun, I got a more in-depth version of the climate lecture and it was really good actually. Also, a great Q&A with a guy who developed a light radar (LIDAR) and is finding all sorts of amazing uses for it, from measuring wind for wind farms to pollutants for city governments. His company is 6 years old, global, and turning 10 million euro of revenue/year. I spoke with him after and he liked my India energy project and offered to turn me onto a guy who does market research there, which could be really useful!

Oh, pictures are here.

Day two: the Ecole Polytechnique

Today we went to the Ecole Polytechnique, the most prestigious technical university in France, although it's under the administration of the Ministry of Defense for some reason, which means the students wear funny little admiral outfits. I restrained from making Naopoleon-based delusions-of-grandeur jokes, because I'm a good guest that way (I just broadcast them later on the internet for all the world to see. And by 'world,' I mean my mom and the one other person who will probably read this). Anyways, we will be here all this week running different workshops. My team did a solar power workshop today, where we had a theoretical lecture and then took some panels outside and measured their energy output. One was the 'control' panel and just laid flat on the ground in direct sun, and the other a) was placed at various angles, b) was placed partially in the shade, and c) had a reflective white piece of foamcore aimed at it. We increased output by 16% by using the foamcore and tilting the angle towards the sun, although the tilt was an average increase of several different angles, so the optimal angle would have been a higher improvement (5-year data from Ecole shows that at that location, output can increase 50% in the winter and 30% in the summer by properly tracking the sun. The difference is because in the winter, a flat panel is at even more of an angle to the sun, which is low on the horizon, and so there are even larger potential gains (panel production peaks when the sun is hitting at a right angle)). Placing a panel half in the shade decreased energy production by 80% (the cells function in serial, so the output of one affects the output of another farther down). At the end of the day, the team which had learned about climate modeling gave us a presentation, followed by climate modeling lecture and Q&A from a panel of distinguished climate scientists: Jean Jouzel and Herve le Treut. They mostly talked about uncertainties in the model (clouds are a bitch) and the nature of communicating science to the public (it's hard). Maybe I sound like an ingrate, but I thought the climate lecture I got as part of my environmental science class at Delft was a lot more comprehensive in terms of explaining feedback and the forcing effects of individual agents. But then I guess that means I'm getting pretty good stuff in my program, which is great! I actually watched a video from Rocky Mountain Institute about integrated building design, and a lot of the things they talked about, like collaborative processes, which are so essential to designing a good building, I thought, "hey, I do that! We do that in the industrial ecology program!" That was pretty cool, and makes me feel like I'm getting a unique education that will be really significant to the world after I graduate. I still wonder how to convince others of that though.

I think it's hard to design a program for people from many different acadmeic backgrounds that presents information which is basic enough for everyone to understand, yet complex enough to keep people interested. Today erred on the side of the former. I mean, I think we all know the basics of climate modeling (and if we don't, we probably should, since we're the top 20% of applicants to a program about climate change). In my lecture on wind and solar energy, I found the information to be pretty basic, and I'm not particularly technical. To be fair, I took a pretty comprehensive class on this stuff at the beginning of the year, but some of the information was just damn obvious (e.g. there's more sun in the Sahara than in France), and other information presented dropped off at points that would allow for pretty innacurate assumptions to be made. For example, we learned about how to calculate the electrical output from a wind turbine, then we saw a graph that showed wind speed distribution at a given location in France. The implication was that you would want to design your turbine to capture the most common wind speeds, but since you cube the speed to find the energy output, you actually want to capture the less common, but higher speeds. I asked about this and the lecturer said something like "well, you have to find a trade-off." But there's a pretty simple way to predict where to design your cut-in and cut-out speeds. There was also a severe disconnect between academic theory and application (as in there wasn't one), although maybe we're just expected to be smart kids and figure it out ourselves. But it's funny just how disconnected academics are from the practical world sometimes; the lecturer showed us how innaccurate wind forecasts can be, and I asked if that would be an area for innovation and entrepreneurship, which he answered by saying that wind modeling was really difficult (literally that's what he said. Does that mean we shouldn't try or something, or its just above our particular group?). The thing is, wind energy companies have to tell system operators at the beginning of the day how much energy they'll deliver each hour. If they're off, they pay a penalty. This means that predicting wind is big business. I knew this, but I wanted to ask a question that would raise the subject so other students could know too, and think about that in terms of innovation and entrepreneurship, but the effort fell flat.

So I wasn't super impressed with Ecole today, but we'll see how the next few days go. Tomorrow my group is doing 'spatial and terrestrial monitoring of the environment.'