randform

There had been some uproar in mediascape-Germany about a study with the title “Konzept für ein integriertes Energieforschungsprogramm für Deutschland” (“Concept for an integrated energy-research program for Germany”). According to Financial times Deutschland” (FTD) the study was commissioned by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research however the study had been withheld from the public for 3 months.

The study is now -after the uproar- openly available. The reasons for the ministries policy of secrecy gave of course way to speculations in the press. So among others the study suggests that besides studying halite rock formations as a suitable geological formation for a final nuclear dump site, like the one in Gorleben it is meanwhile scientifically established that also Claystone formations may provide an alternative for a final nuclear waste repository. Since most of these rock formations can (according to FTD) be found in the current ministers “electoral homeland” Baden-Würtemberg and since the german elections will take place in about one and a half weeks it is understandable that the press identified this fact as a possible reason for the withheld (i.e. nobody wants a nuclear dump site in ones own backyard).

Another possible reason why the study was withheld was seen in the fact that the study suggests that an enforced research in nuclear power generation – and in particular in new nuclear fission technology could be a politically desired pathway in energy research (note the subtlety: the study does not suggest to pursue enforced research in nuclear energy, but states that enforced research in nuclear energy, in particular in new reactor types, may be a political request). This is in contrast to the current official political line of the minister and chancelor Angela Merkels party the CDU. Their official line (towards voters) is basically that power genration via nuclear fission should play NO role in Germanys future energy generation.

I have unfortunately currently not the time to study the study in full detail but nevertheless – here are some remarks to the study:

The study was made under the auspices of two german science/humanities academies, namely the National academy of science and the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities a third collaborator was the German Academy of Science and Engineering (Acatech), which claims itself to be a non profit agency, which represents the interests of German sciences and technology. Acatech has a strong connection to business, last but not least via funding. This has advantages and disadvantages.

Responsible for the text of the study are Prof. Dr. Frank Behrendt (Institut für Energietechnik, TU Berlin), Prof. Dr. Ortwin Renn (Abteilung für Technik – und Umweltsoziologie, Universität Stuttgart), Prof. Dr. Ferdi Schüth (Max- Planck-Institut für Kohlenforschung, Mülheim/Ruhr) and Prof. Dr. Eberhard Umbach (Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe), however the study encompasses contributions from numerous individuals (p.58 of the study) which are researchers from universities but also representatives of companies such as Siemens. As a remark: the company Siemens seems to intent to terminate its engagement within the french nuclear company AREVA, however according to this article it may replace its french engagement with a cooperation with the russian nuclear company Atomenergoprom. This should put the neutrality at least of parts of the study -namely those concerning nuclear power generation- under scrutiny.

A main argument of the study is that the challenges of Germany’s future power generation can only be dealt with in a – what the authors call- “systemic perspective” that is with an approach which integrates not only the scientific and technological demands of power generation but also the juridicial, sociological etc. aspects which are connected with it. The arguments are similar to the IPCC conclusions. For accomplishing this integration approach the study suggests among others to establish energy research clusters (similar to the US american Energy Frontier Research Center (EFRC), public-private partnerships like the british Energy Technologies Institute (ETI) and one central german energy research center which bundles the research activity and which serves as an outside representative for Germany’s energy research. The tasks and concrete realizations of such a center havent been yet not very much specified, however integrating and coordinating energy research is in my opinion definitely sound.

Moreover the study collects “no-regret” research options, like research in insulation improvements, energy efficiency, research in how necessary behavioural changes may be adressed appropriately, in how international agreements could be furthered etc. At this place I would have liked to see a stronger discussion of the problems related to patents/intellectual property rights obstructing technological development and international agreement processes.

Within the technological component the study identifies three main research sectors according to which politics can choose to put emphasis on. These are: regenerative energies, carbon based energies and finally -although as pointed out above there is currently no official political backing for this- nuclear energy. The technological aspects of each sector are introduced in the study in a socalled module.

I’d like to concentrate a bit on the nuclear energy module, since the text of the nuclear energy module is mildly put indeed controversial.

As already indicated the aspect that nuclear fission research may be pursued only with the goal of securing its safe pullback (which is the official political line!) is just a little side remark in the text.

In particular it is argued that in order to keep a fall back option on nuclear (fission) energy, Germany could feel strongly advised to support research in new fission technology and thus could feel the need to support the development of fast breeders and in particular in 4’th generation reactorsystems:

Deutschland kann sich aufgrund seiner Expertise hier an vorderster Stelle beteiligen, um unter anderem höchste Sicherheitsstandards zu etablieren.

(translation without guarantee: Germany may – based on its expertise – take part in this in the front row in order to establish among others highest security standards.)

The option that a fallback option on nuclear fission technology could also exist without a german research effort or accomplished with just a small german contribution like within an international noncommercially oriented community research project (my favoured option) is not mentioned.

The study mentions the necessity to keep a fallback option on nuclear fission due to the reason that climate change could have more dramatic consequences than expected, this was also annotated in an earlier randform post.

However the study suggests that such a fallback option may also be justified by the strong pressure which may be due to an international renaissance of nuclear fission technology and which may be due to raising energy needs (p.15) especially in regard to financial feasibility (p.12).

Yet the most problematic part of the nuclear module was the sentence:

“Außerdem müssen bei einer Wiederaufnahme der Forschungsarbeiten zu neuen Reaktoren bereits frühzeitig Ansätze entwickelt werden, mittels derer die Technologie gegebenenfalls umgesetzt werden könnte, ohne Widerständen zu begegnen oder – für den Fall, das dies nicht möglich ist – mit diesen Widerständen konstruktiv umzugehen.”

(translation without guarantee: Furthermore in case of a resumption of the research efforts concerning new reactor types one has to develop at an early stage approaches with which the technology could be realized without encountering resistance or – if this is not possible – develop approaches on how to deal with this resistances in a constructive way.)

I hope this sentence was a very unfortunate phrasing accident and that the authors do not really mean what they write here.

Just a quick link to an interesting article in the Washington monthly about possible future developments within the US and other high-tuition-dependent-educational systems ->College for $99 a Month

very, very short summary: the article explains that cheap online education (eventually outsourced to India etc.) may lure college students into taking standard classes in the internet instead of in a typical college. This development could be accelerated due to the economic crisis. Standard courses usually “nurture” the more specialized classes, hence it can be feared that the overall quality may suffer from this.

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Our friend Sophie Molholm coorganized recently a conference in multisensory research. Looking at the conference announcement I felt inspired to ask myself again to what extend rational cognitive instances do influence perception. An example: A traffic light in the western world is usually considered to have the colors red-yellow-green (or at least red and green (although the new LED lights look kind of bluish)). However I think it is important to note that in japaneese the green color for a traffic light – is not “MIDORI” (green), but “AOUI”, which is BLU! Did this make japanese people more prone to call something green-bluish “blue” instead of green? Doing experiments for this example might be difficult due to the ethnic pecularities, but I am sure there exist other examples and probably even studies on that subject.

here a little collection of randform posts related to the subject:

naming-gaming: evolution of languages
wirepullers: artwork challenging salience
manicone: artwork challenging 4 dimensional space perception
focus and context, part I: evolution and knowledge formation
focus and context, part IV: A Physicist Experiments With Cultural Studies: knowledge formation in humanities vs natural sciences
Le manoir du diable: conscientious coloring of astronomical data
common sense: designing computer minds at media lab
canny skinny skin scans perception and quantum computing (see also focus and context, part IIa: A quantum computation game)
error incognito:perception and space
Dreammachine: psychadelic effects in neuroscience
uncanny paintings: link to an experiment using facial expressions as a feedback interface for a painterly rendering algorithm
visualizing meaning: link to a survey concerning the usefulness of diagrams and charts in knowledge building (and a funny comment to that)

Last weakend we were doing a visit to the Deutsche Museum.

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The frequent randform visitor knows that randforms main issue is not “popularizing science“.

Although we eventually may post an article which could be finally considered as “popular science” (last not least because we like to talk about science in a rather easy understandable way) we are mainly interested in discussing the communicational and perceptional manifestations of science. The visual ways of communication are here of special importance and thus we are especially proud that we were included in a carefully and thoughtfully edited book about blogs that are related to graphic design.

From the book cover:

Blog, weblog, logbook – these are words of our time. Although blogs have existed since the end of the 1990’s, they flourished only in recent years. Weblogs gained its popularity as a medium to tell stories and develop thoughts through dialogue.

With advancement of the Internet technology, creating and publishing a blog is as simple as it is to check your emails. What makes the difference is therefore, outstanding content. Blogs, Mad about design is a collection of the most interesting and exiting blogs that are related to graphic design.

Blogs, Mad about design
Mao Mao publications (2009) (blog)
ISBN 978-981-245-715-8

The text about randform in the book:

A blog that is dedicated to investigating the intersection between mathematics, physics, art and design. This includes visualizations and mathematical representations in terms of images, symbols processes, etc. as well as the general fundamentals of perceptive/cognitive thought, including topics that range from computers capable of seeing, to the architecture of information and interactive design.

The area of the above squares shall visualize a certain amount of money.

A little puzzle for randform visitors:

The upper outer square visualizes an amount which is … times bigger as the amount of the upper inner square.

The lower outer square visualizes an amount which is … times bigger as the amount of the lower inner square.

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In a recent post on his blog Terence Tao had the idea to scale the US budget and other data with the scale factor of 3/100 million. In particular the US population of 306.44 million shrinks -if one uses this factor- to about 9 people (306.44million/(100 million/3) =3.0644*3 =(approx) 9 people) which is about one to two average families. He did that in order to facilitate the comparision of the US-budget with a normal one-to-two family household budget.

I found that a useful visualization experiment and thus tried to do the same with the german budget – that is I used a scale factor which scales the population of Germany (originally 82.099 million down to 9, i.e. I used the factor 0.000 000 11 = 11/100 million (82099000*0.00000011 = 9.03..) and multiplied it with the corresponding amount in euro and in US-dollar (since I did this with an online currency calculator on different days there may be some variations). All calculations are without guarantee and I hope mistakes will be pointed out to me in the comment section. I abbreviate the number 1 billion = 10^9=1 000 000 000 with the letter B. So 1 B$ means 1 billion US dollar. Interesting figures are highlighted with an ->.

The revenues and spending in Germany are divided into the federal government (“Bund“) on one hand and the federal states (“Länder“) and districts (“Gemeinden“) on the other hand (here details in german). Both shares are very roughly the same. For example in 2005 the spending was
Bund 294.0 BEuro
Länder 259.3 BEuro and Gemeinden 153.3 BEUro
alltogether: 625.9 Beuro

I found no survey on the federal states and districts, besides this overall Länder and Gemeinden revenues and spending. The federal states are for example in charge for schools, I think they do not pay for military (?). However besides this the federal government budget (“Bund“) gives already quite a good overview over priorities.

I recovered the other data (like GDP etc.) to a great part from the federal office of statistics which hosts confusingly also the statistikportal. The website of this federal office is -mildly put- uncomfortable. That refers not only to the overall webdesign like for example it took me more than quite a while to find detailed readings on the GDP (since I started out at the statistikportal), but also to the overall accessability of data. For example I was also interested wether things like the Abwrackpraemie raise or lower the GDP or wether paying for volunteering could raise the GDP in some way…(just as a trick for the upcoming elections…), however in this GDP document it is even not possible to deduce within a reasonable amount of time which positions are summed over and which are subtracted.

Here some

But back to the budget discussion. The federal government (“Bund”) budget (Bundeshaushaltsplan) which is as explained above about half of the overall german budget is available as a pdf document here. From it one can read off a lot of the following figures (I tried approximately to reflect the ones Terence Tao chose). If there is no other link provided then the corresponding number in the below list is from this document.

Example: If the federal government (“bund”) has a budget of 283.200 BEuro for 2008 then this is a scaled budget of 283 200 000 000 Euro * 0.00000011 = 31152 Euro. Since this is as explained above about one half of the overall german budget the state family of 9 has thus an approximate budget of 2*31152 Euro =
->(approx) 60 000 Euro (per year).

That is 2* 383.343 B$=2*383 343 000 000$ which gives a scaled budget of 2*42167 $ =(approx) 84 000 $ (per year) which is in the same range as the US budget of 75 000 $ (per year), which appears in Terence Taos list. Compare these 60 000 Euros to the salary of 500 000 Euros which are not enough for the best.

The green number is a real budget number which is rescaled to the budget of a “family of 9 people” in Euro, the blue number gives the same amount in dollar so that it is comparable with the US budget in Terence Taos list.

• Health insurance: 3.692 BEuro 4.993 B$ 406 Euro 549 $
• Children payments (Kindergeld): 0.3 BEuro 0.41 B$ 33 Euro 45 $
• Social Security/unemployment payments: 94.313 BEuro 127.614 B$ 10374 Euro 14038 $
• consequence of war payments: 3.200 BEuro 4.332 B$352 Euro 477 $

• Autobahn:3.323 BEuro 4.496 BEuro365 Euro 494 $

• economic collaboration and development:4.985 BEuro 6.748 B$548 Euro 742 $

• Department of Education: 2008 budget 9.350 BEuro 12.655 B$1028 Euro 1392 $
• Department of Education: 2009 budget (planned): 10.2 BEuro 14.262 B$ 1122 Euro 1569 $
• DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) 0.840 BEuro
  1.136 B$ 92 Euro 125 $
• Maths & Physical Sciences: ?
  couldn’t find a total number but humanities, natural sciences (i.e. chemistry, physics, math, geosciences), life sciences and engineering hold each about an equal share) so

• natural sciences approx: 0.210 BEuro 0.284 B$ 23 Euro 31 $

• nuclear energy:0.222 BEuro 0.310 B$ 24 Euro

  34 $

• ->renewable energies: 0.039 BEuro 0.054 B$ 4 Euro 30 cents

  6 $
  (some additional support for renewables comes in through the Feed-in tarif)

• mining (mostly subsidies):2.164 BEuro 3.023 B$ 238 Euro

  303 $

• coal mining: 1.900 BEuro 2.650 B$ 209 Euro 291 $

• Abwrackpraemie (car scrapping bonus) (source) 5 BEuro 7.068 B$ 550 Euro 779 $
• Opel retrieval (which is without any environmental requirements if I understood correctly):
• bail: 4.5 BEuro 6.361 B$ 495 Euro 700 $
• temporary loan: 1.5 BEuro 2.120 B$ 165 Euro 233 $
• cars and electricity: economic stimulus for electromobility: 0.5 BEuro 0.706 B$ 55 Euro 77 $
  comment: de facto this amounts to a percentual decline in investments in renewable energies, which seems to be an overall trend – the International Energy Agency estimates that

  “for 2009 as a whole investment in renewables could drop by as much as 38%, although stimulus provided by government fiscal packages can probably offset a small proportion of this decline”

• up-to-the-second update on the budget deficit on the website of Bund der Steuerzahler (community of taxpayers)
• Additional appropriations (not included in regular budget)
  • Afghanistan: ?:
    • -military operations?
    • development aid ?
• Air force NY flyover helicopter flights politicians:?
• National GDP 2008: 2 489.400 BEuro 3336.527 B$ 273 834 Euro 367 018 $
• GDP per capita 2008: 30 322 Euros 42 366 $
  (note: the above gives for 2008: 3336.527 *10^9$/82.099 * 10^6 = 40640.287 $ = 30321.899 Euros which compares to 40415.409 $ in 2007)(quaterly report 2008. -> the report how the GDP recently decreased rather dramatically)
• ->estimated risks in german banks: 816 BEuro 1140 B$ 89 760 Euro 125 700 $
• World GDP 2008: 39 079 BEuro 54 589 B$Terence Tao: 1,680,000 *3.7=(approx) 6.2 million $ =(compares to) 6 004 700 $ = (approx) 6 million $ (2007)
• ->Credit Default swaps notional value (2008) 57 325 B$ 40 996 BEuro 4 509 600 Euro =(approx) 4.5 million Euros 6 305 700 $ =(approx) 6.3 million $ (note: Terence Tao used a different source)
• ->OTC derivatives notional value (2008): 489 354 BEuro 683 725 B$ 53 828 900 Euro =(approx) 54 million Euro 75 209 800 $ = (approx) 75 million $ (note: Terence Tao used a different source)

supplement 11.10.11: An example how one could visualize the above is at wheredoesmymoneygo

(old GDR advertisement of the electrical engineering industry)

There was a longer discussion on that randform post about oppression in the GDR. Within the discussion a randform reader called Ditta found my opinion that “part of all that huge mess of a wall through the streets of Berlin was plain economic warfare” absurd. This is still my opinion: there were surely people running away from East Germany for pure political reasons, but I dare say that a not to small part left for economical reasons. Moreover this reasoning doesnt justify the wall, I think it is clear that the wall was an inhuman mistake. The discussion just sheds a different light on the involved motivations.

I currently have not the time to discuss this in detail and since this is a different thread I hereby link to the comment which led to Ditta’s reaction and ask people who wish to discuss this issue to leave their comments here at this thread.

Blogwise – I am currently preparing a blog entry, which takes more time than I would have suspected…in particular I am not on vacation.