Recognizing that global collaboration is imperative for solving the world's greatest challenges has been a powerful paradigm shift in recent years. This global focus is important to create impact at scale, and also helps when solving pressing challenges within our own local communities; sometimes the solution is right at our fingertips, and other times, the idea is budding across a distant border.
Launched at the Second Annual Exponential Impact Day on June 15th, the 2015 Singularity University Impact Challenge is a new impact competition in collaboration with California Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom. The goal? To help alleviate the severe drought in California by leveraging new and exponentially growing technologies.
"Water is certainly one of our Global Grand Challenges," says Emeline Paat-Dahlstrom, chief impact officer at Singularity University. "And if you look at our mission, it embodies what we want to do as an organization, which is to leverage exponential technology to solve a Global Grand Challenge. What better way to do that than to solve the biggest problem in California right now and one that is in our backyard?"
Golden Opportunity, Soylentils: What's your technological magic bullet solve a problem caused by generations of water policy failures?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 28 2015, @06:36AM
Using a saltwater secondary cooling loop which is doubling as both a steam generator and 'purified exhaust water collection system'. Instead of leaving the cooling towers open as is currently done, have them vent into a secondary chamber surrounding the inner tower to condense and use gravity to wick the condensed water away to either storage or pumping facilities as needed for storage or distribution. Depending on design this could also provide a retrofit option for current facilities while allowing gravity fed 'dump' water in the case of a reactor or pump failure that might otherwise allow the reactor to go critical.
The fine details of the engineering is beyond me, but this could solve three issues at once, baseline power generation, water production for high demand areas, and reactor safety for situations where loss of water flow or capacity could drive a reactor critical.
(Score: 2) by Gravis on Tuesday July 28 2015, @06:46AM
As nuclear power plants are complex construction projects, their construction periods are longer than other large power plants. It is typically expected to take 5 to 7 years to build a large nuclear unit (not including the time required for planning and licensing).
anon-fail.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 28 2015, @09:15AM
pfft. just throw a boat load of old smoke alarms in a big bonfire and park a few firetrucks full of water close to it and BAM! INSTANT NUCULAR STEAM SHIZ!
*trundles off to file patent*
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday July 28 2015, @02:17PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2015, @01:04AM
The San Onofre nuke plant was shut down after its operator (SoCal Edison) proved to be untrustworthy.
You could call them "incompetent", but that would be letting them off easy--they are simply liars.
The only remaining nukes in Cali are at Pacific Gas and Electric's Diablo Canyon facility.
That is an ecological nightmare, sucking in tons of sea life every day and expelling it as dead biomass.
The plant is build on an earthquake fault.
Diablo Canyon is a disaster.
The publicly-owned ("Socialist--gasp) Los Angeles Department of Water and Power has always said NO to nukes.
DWP demonstrates again and again what lousy providers SCE and PG&E (profit-driven corps) are.
Want to build a nuke in Cali?
Start here:
Pay 75 years of liability insurance up front (the way the USA Post Office has to pre-pay its retirement fund).
Good luck finding an underwriter for that.
...and NO, you can't get federal help nor a waiver.
The title of this page contains the word "ABUNDANCE".
What Cali has in ABUNDANCE is SUNLIGHT.
Once your collectors are in place, the energy is gratis.
There are also plenty of mountain passes that have wind whipping through them.
Capture that energy. (People on the receiving end of Santa Ana winds will thank you.)
Again, after the turbines are up, the energy doesn't require railway cars or pipelines nor does it involve high-level waste (which USA has been producing with nukes since 1943--though we haven't yet figured out what to do with that).
-- gewg_
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2015, @09:15PM
The publicly-owned ("Socialist--gasp) Los Angeles Department of Water and Power has always said NO to nukes.
The LADWP owns (and has owned since the beginning [latimes.com]) 5.7% [clui.org] of the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station [wikipedia.org] to the west of Phoenix. Fortunately, the plant, like the coal-burning power plants that provide the bulk of the city's power, is well downwind of Los Angeles.
(Score: 2) by Gravis on Wednesday July 29 2015, @02:45AM
phil, how is that going to help them when they only have a year of water left before the shit really hits the fan?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Gravis on Tuesday July 28 2015, @06:43AM
the drought in California is not the actual problem. the actual problem is greed. you can move agriculture to areas with sustainable water supplies but they dont because there is more profit in staying in that climate and pumping in water that heavily subsidized by the state. take away the water subsidies and agriculture will leave town overnight. as a result there will be plenty of water for everyone else.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2015, @01:09AM
move agriculture
To where? The Great Plains where they're pumping their aquifer dry?
...and where there is water, they are already growing other crops there.
You also don't appreciate the amount of sunlight that Cali gets or the long growing seasons.
Easy stuff on water use:
1) Outlaw grass permanently in SoCal.
Astroturf if you need green; native plants or shredded tree bark or pebbles (xeriscaping) only.
N.B. Watering plants during the heat of the day is currently forbidden for residential consumers.
Do farmers have the same limitation?
2) Forbid water-intensive crops (annuals) like cotton and rice.
Only allow those again after^W if the drought breaks.
...and stop using acre-foot as a unit for water measurement.
The summary doesn't make me want to go read the story.
Sounds like eggheads with double-talk.
The problem is defined simply: People are ignoring the fact that they live in a desert.
Any solution has to start there.
-- gewg_
(Score: 4, Insightful) by hemocyanin on Tuesday July 28 2015, @06:45AM
Step 1: listen to windbags talk about levers.
Step 2: shove lever where the sun don't shine (in windbags)
Step 3: laugh.
There was so much BS in that blurb that if I could scrape it off my computer screen, I could fertilize my garden for next three years.
Anyway, if they're interested. Solution to chronic water shortages: acknowledge you live in a desert and accept the fact that you don't get to pretend you don't.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday July 28 2015, @08:15AM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 3, Interesting) by FatPhil on Tuesday July 28 2015, @08:17AM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Wednesday July 29 2015, @12:20AM
It's known as Buzzword Bingo, if you collect the whole set you win a prize. You may have had an opportunity to play if you've ever sat in on a Marketing meeting at work, or HR, they're really good at it.
(Score: 4, Funny) by wonkey_monkey on Tuesday July 28 2015, @07:13AM
Combating Scarcity With Abundance
That's so crazy it might just work!
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 28 2015, @08:08AM
Next up, combating poverty with wealth. After that we might try to tackle hunger with food followed by bullshit fatigue with a nap.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday July 28 2015, @08:18AM
Wait, there's more... Not any Abundance, but the one created by "leveraging exponential technology".
Maaan, we'll be so cracking under the load of Abundance that soon we'll need to combat Abundance with Scarcity... "exponential technology" to the rescue again, eh?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 28 2015, @09:11AM
duh!
that's why god invented computers!
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 28 2015, @12:39PM
> The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.
An exponentially bad shortcoming?
I enjoyed correcting a colleague when he said "it grows exponentially" with regards to some combinatorial problem. Of course, it grows factorally... oh to be so hated by one's colleagues, is there anything finer in life.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 28 2015, @05:58PM
> oh to be so hated by one's colleagues, is there anything finer in life?
To crush your enemies. See them driven before you. Hear the lamentations of their women.
(Score: 2) by WillR on Tuesday July 28 2015, @02:41PM
The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.
It's a cognitive bias that served us well for a million years before the current era, and probably will again once as shrinking silicon processes gets harder and fossil carbon based energy gets more expensive. Long term exponential growth only happens in Singularity believers' imaginations and freshmen economics textbooks, in nature it's rapidly constrained by a shortage of some necessary input.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 28 2015, @03:31PM
FTFY
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 28 2015, @07:14AM
The bullet is purely technological, it isn't magic. It's just a plain old 7.62×51mm NATO, put into the heads of the right people who are causing the problem, namely the politicians who refuse to remove agricultural subsidies for water, making water-wasteful agriculture profitable in an arid land.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 28 2015, @08:24AM
An exponential technology, aside from being a PowerPC processor fabricator from the '90's, is just something this not-a-real-university came up with about 2010-2011 and has been trying to sell ever since. Nevermind that it does not exist.
Or as the story quotes "It takes a single drop of water to start a wave, one person, one idea. When collectively working with other people, that wave is going to happen and it’s going to change lives." (Gemma Bulos)
I guess they just think being super extroverted and having lots of positive feelings is how engineering gets done.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 28 2015, @02:09PM
> I guess they just think being super extroverted and having lots of positive feelings is how engineering gets done.
FYI, Singularity University is a project from Peter Diamandis. [wikipedia.org] You might recognize one of his other projects - the X-Prize Foundation.
Full disclosure, my wife is friends with his wife.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 28 2015, @06:27PM
A person can have both successes and failures. Be a fool and a philanthropist, no?
(Score: 2) by meisterister on Tuesday July 28 2015, @07:24PM
So about as coherent as timecube but far less entertaining.
0/10 would not read again.
(May or may not have been) Posted from my K6-2, Athlon XP, or Pentium I/II/III.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 28 2015, @09:09AM
here's mine:
http://www.snagabargain.co.uk/product_images/d/116/magic_bullet_2__79261_zoom.jpg [snagabargain.co.uk]
it even blends
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 28 2015, @10:36AM
Here's mine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fermentation [wikipedia.org] (as is who needs water, ethanol's got electrolytes...)
Of course if we actually want to solve this issue, we need to stop looking for a technical fix.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 28 2015, @11:04AM
Chief Impact Officer - Gavin Newsom - Singularity - leveraging ... - exponential ... - Grand Global Challenge ... what a load of...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 28 2015, @05:21PM
Yeah, have you ever seen the shitfest at Singularity meetups? It's a pyramid scheme for selling diet foods, vitamin regimens, colonics, and etc. to try and live long enough to be in "the singularity". TFA can shove it up their... oh, wait, "Chief Impact Officer". Hmm.
(Score: 1) by Murdoc on Wednesday July 29 2015, @07:42AM
This has practically been the motto of Technocracy [technocracy.ca] (probably not the kind you're thinking of). It's a proposal for for a sustainable, post-scarcity economic system, designed in the 1920s and usable since at least the 1930s, in North America anyway. When you simply organize what we already have properly, there is no need to wait for artificially intelligent humanoid robots, or nanotech replicators, or any of that stuff in order to produce an "abundance" of goods and services. You just have to get rid of the hugely monumental waste [technocracy.ca] that we have today that most people don't even know about. Technocracy would greatly help problems of poverty, crime, pollution, and certainly this water shortage. One way might be by having better water distribution throughout the continent so that places without a shortage could help places with. Another would be better energy production for desalination. The main way though is simply not wasting as much as we do today.
Of course this isn't a short-term solution for this particular drought, just one we could have had before any of us were even born. But maybe we can help prevent this and other problems in the future if we start treating our resources properly.