Updates on World Oil Production and Demand

IEA (International Energy Agency) weekly oil report was issued June 10. Global oil product demand is expected to average 86.8 mb/d in 2008, 80 kb/d below last month’s estimate, following the reduction of price subsidies in several non-OECD countries. Global growth is cut even more steeply by 230 kb/d to +0.9% or +800 kb/d when …

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Blog Economics

Chitika, an ad network, had a study of the revenues of the top 50,000 blogs for 2006 Chitika made the assumption that an estimate of total advertising revenues for a blog would be 3 times as much as the Chitika revenue for the blog. Using revenue trends and statistics from a representativesample for the 12000+ …

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Modelling and Enabling a Manufacturing and Construction Revolution

This site recently discussed the seeds of Manufacturing and construction revolution. The seeds of the revolution are:– Contour crafting (scaling up inkjet/rapid prototyping up to making buildings, cement jet) Use cement as the ink. Layer by layer additive construction. 200 timesfaster than conventional methods. 5 times lower cost for construction. – Inflatable electric cars. Flatship …

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Top Ten Near Term Developments for Vastly Improved Capabilities in Space

1. Fuel depots. 2-17 times more stuff to the moon or other space missions. Lowering costs for GTO closer to LEO orbit costs Boeing Propellant fuel depot 2. Lunar concrete would reduce the amount of material needed to build things on the moon by ten times. A 50 meter telescope could be built from lunar …

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Obama’s plan to tax the rich won’t work

Businessweek discusses Obama’s plan to increase the marginal tax rate back to the level under Bill Clinton and before the Bush tax cuts Of the 149 million households filing federal income taxes for 2006, some 3% reported income between $200,000 and $500,000; fewer than 1% claimed income above half a million dollars. The Bush administration …

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New Apple iPhone 2.0 Available July 11, 2008 starting at $199

The New Apple iPhone 2.0 able to use faster 3G communication was announced today. It will be available for $199 for the 8GB model and $299 for the 16GB model. iPhone 2.0 will be availabe July 11, 2008. Competing SmartphonesThe Economist magazine notes that while the Apple iPhone has 20% of the smartphone market in …

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Lorentz Force propulsion Successful test

Since the recent trial [with explosive arcing problems] , Peck and his colleagues at the University of Michigan and State University of New York, Binghamton, have successfully tested (but not yet published) their propulsion system, which could speed satellites along at more than four and a half miles a second. More recent tests of solder-less …

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Los Alamos Roadrunner supercomputer will run at over one petaflop/second sustained speed in 2009

Roadrunner is a cluster of approximately 3,250 compute nodes interconnected by an off-the-shelf parallel-computing network. Each compute node consists of two AMD Opteron dual-core microprocessors, with each of the Opteron cores internally attached to one of four enhanced Cell microprocessors. This enhanced Cell does double-precision arithmetic faster and can access more memory than can the …

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Seeds of a new manufacturing revolution

A transformation in the pace of economic growth can be achieved even without nanofactories. These pre-nanofactory methods would transition well to a world with nanofactories when they do arrive. A coordinated effort by research, companies and government could be made to plan and develop Rapid Automated Manufacturing by 2030. There could be an increase in …

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Built for Speed: Printing Buildings

Contour Crafting is an effort to scale up rapid prototyping/manufacturing (a billion dollar industry to make 3 dimensional parts) and inkjet printing techniques to the scale of building multi-story buildings and vehicles. The process could accelerate the trillion dollar (US only) construction industry by 200 times. Projections indicate costs will be around one fifth as …

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True three dimensional display.

72 inch diagonal Holovizio720RC display European Union funded Holografika is offering superior 3D displays that provide the full 3D information to the viewer. (Most other 3D displays provide partial information). The Holovizio product is not just using 2D images and visual tricks, it is providing a real 3d image. Benefits:– The pictures don’t “jump” between …

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