Curious to know how sex and technology intersect? Arse Elektronika is certain to titillate. This year's theme, "screw the system" looks to explore questions such as:

"What are the labor conditions of non-Western workers who make most of the world's sex toys? What's the environmental footprint of a technologically assisted orgasm? How does the criminalization or stigma of sex tech production harm the communities in which it is produced? What's the product life-cycle and planning horizon of sex tech? What are the barriers to entry for sex tech production? How important is intellectual property to sex tech, and how is it enforced?"

The event kicks off its opening night with the Prixxx Arse award for the best in sex machines, orgasmotrons and teledildonics on Thursday, September 29th at Chez Poulet. The event is organized by the Austrian art collective, monochrom.

Talks at the event include such topics as "Making a Mind Controlled Dildo" and hands on workshops for the DIY crowd.

While Arse Elektronika isn't going to please all, I can't imagine a city better suited for such an event. For the curious, you can check out the full schedule on Arse Elektronika's website.

Visualization courtesy of gaffta.org

While not accredited, the certification crosses a broad range of creative coding and technical disciplines designed to expand your horizons. Gray Area offers four types of certifications: Sound Emphasis, Visual Emphasis, Physical Interaction and Web Emphasis.

Having taken the Processing class last summer at GAFFTA, I can attest to the high quality of the teachers and the curriculum. Since then, they have expanded to offering 17 classes in areas from Processing, Arduino and Soft Circuity to Javascript, HTML 5 and Data Visualization.

I am so excited to learn their expanding their curriculum, as it's one of the few places in San Francisco to offer such unique classes at very affordable rates. If you're interested in learning more, visit GAFFTA online.

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Courtesy of Kevin Manalili.

Kevin Manalili, the Director of Operations recently sent out an email to Academy staff answering some questions about the California Academy of Sciences building. He gave me permission to share the email in this post. It details some of the more interesting methods needed to operate a Green building and it will show you some of what goes on behind the scenes at the Academy.

Ever wonder how the Academy makes salt water for our cold and tropical salt water tanks?

We start with salt – lots of salt. Each of these bags contains 2,000 lbs of it. Engineers use the power chain hoist to safely lift each bag over to the salt water mixing cistern located underneath the life support system room.

In addition to the salt, there are 11 additional ingredients to the CAS salt formula. Laurie’s demonstrating her new checklist that ensures the mix is correct 100% of the time.

The Academy recently converted over from Instant Ocean (the Bisquick for salt water aquarists) to our own blend. The salt water team took months to investigate and test the new mixture that reduces our cost from $0.12 per gallon to under $0.08 per gallon. This is a big deal when you are making over 2.7 million gallons per year!

Just before making the transition, the cisterns where the water is mixed and stored needed to be cleaned. In a joint effort, the Aquarium Staff and the Engineers drained the cisterns, washed down the silt, and collected it for disposal. Arnel’s in this tank after most of the water was drained and the space certified safe for people to enter.

Ever wonder how the glass roof is cleaned?

The panes of glass that ring the living roof house thousands of solar cells and keep the perimeter of the building dry. Unlike a regular roof, the glass needs to be washed regularly to remove any debris and deposits that can permanently etch the glass. A soft brush at the end of a long pole, with filtered water that removes any chemicals and minerals that will spot the glass, are the only tools used – no chemicals.

The same technique is used on most of the building’s glass surfaces, both inside and out.

Ever wonder how we spread compost on a steep slope?

Spreading compost to improve the planting conditions on the south slope is difficult. The process used to be carrying buckets of the stuff by hand, up and down a hill, trampling plants and compacting the soil in the process. Enter jet mulching! Specialty trucks use compressed air to push to compost through a flexible tube, literally blowing the mulch onto the hillside. Three trucks made quick work of our hillside in just a few hours. They placed three times the amount of mulch in a quarter of the time, for the same cost.

Ever wonder what went into the Academy's LEED Platinum certification?

The Academy earned its LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Platinum certification for New Construction (NC) with a score of 54 out of a possible 69 points. The LEED NC was designed to guide and distinguish high-performance commercial and institutional projects. Our building was graded on six categories that included sustainability, water efficiency, energy use, and indoor environmental quality, and was based on how the building was constructed. We are now nearly complete with our submission to the United States Green Building Council (USGBC) for our Existing Building Operations and Maintenance (EB-OM) certification. The EB-OM checklist has a total of 110 points and helps us measure the operations, improvements, and maintenance with the goal of maximizing efficiency and minimizing environmental impacts. The project team are in the homestretch of this nearly two year project!

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Science Hack Day is a science hacker's dream.

Do you have a science idea you'd like to explore, tinker on and develop among a group of peers? If so, Science Hack Day is the event for you. From November 13 – 14 the Institute For The Future in Palo Alto will be hosting a smorgasboard of science and technology enthusiasts who are coming together for two fast and furious days of idea development and prototype creation.

Science Hack Day originated in London and has hopped the pond to San Francisco. There's a great team of sixteen science enthusiasts working on making this a huge success including Kishore Hari (UCSF), Ariel Waldman (Spacehack.org), Tantek Çelik (Microformats.org + Mozilla) and Kirsten “Dr. Kiki” Sanford (This Week In Science).

So who should attend this event? Here's what Science Hack Day's website has to say about that:

Science Hack Day is for anyone with an interest in bringing science and technology together (from dabbling with APIs/datasets/interface design to biotech experiments and prototyping near-space payloads). If you’re a coder, designer, scientist, citizen scientist, hacker or just an enthusiastic person with good ideas, Science Hack Day is for you.

Well that convinced me! I'll be attending, hacking and reporting on the event. And you should come too! You can sign up here.

If you're looking for inspiration, or would like to know what projects attendees have expressed interest in doing, check out the Science Hack Day wiki.

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The 2011 Chevy Volt at the 2010 Plug-In Conference. Photo by Sheraz Sadiq

Originally reported for KQEDnews.org.

After years of stops and starts, electric cars and plug-in hybrids are on the cusp of a new era of mainstream acceptance, starting this year.

That was the message this week from automakers, government officials and utility operators at the Plug-In 2010 conference, a major international gathering of alternative vehicles at the San Jose Convention Center.

“Now the rubber hits the road”, said Craig Childers, an air resources engineer with the California Air Resources Board. “This is the last conference where we don’t have the cars. When we do this again next year, there’s going to be thousands of people driving these cars and it’s going to be great to see how that happens. We’ll learn from it and continue to evolve.”

A large amount of attention at the event went to two vehicles: the battery electric Nissan Leaf and the Chevy Volt, a plug-in hybrid. Both groundbreaking cars will begin appearing in showrooms in December.

At Tuesday’s conference, GM announced the Volt’s sticker price will be $41,000. A federal tax credit will bring the cost of the vehicle down by $7,500. The Volt also be available to lease for $350 a month for 36 months, assuming a down payment of $2,500.

GM calls the Volt an “extended-range electric vehicle,” which means that the car can go 40 miles on a single battery charge, using no gasoline. An additional 300 miles can be driven as the car uses gasoline to power an on-board generator to make more electricity and power the engine.

Tony Pasowatz, the Volt’s Vehicle Line Director, said that distance is key for getting consumers to overcome their “range anxiety” and trust that the Volt will get them where they need to go without being stranded with an empty battery.

“The Volt gives you an extended range capability that no other electric vehicle can provide you,” Pasowatz said. “So we have a good, solid confident proposition of 340 miles, whereas many electric cars will not achieve the range that they claim because their range is on a city cycle which no one drives, it doesn’t account for running the heating and air conditioning, and it doesn’t account for the degradation of the battery. And if you really only get 50 miles, the question is can that be your everyday car?”

The Nissan Leaf, an all-electric vehicle, which has a range of 100 miles on a single charge, will be made available to consumers by December in five states initially, including California.
To date, there have been 20,000 pre-orders for the Nissan Leaf, with more than 3,000 of those orders coming from prospective buyers in the Bay Area.

Mark Perry from Nissan standing next to the Leaf, an all electric-vehicle. Photo by Sheraz Sadiq

For Mark Perry, Director of Product Planning at Nissan, the consumer acceptance of the new generation of electric cars in the state resonates nation-wide. “If there was a barrier to adoption called affordability, that’s been knocked over. If there was a barrier to adoption called charging infrastructure, it’s been knocked over here in CA. There are no barriers now. The entire country is looking at California as a lead.”

The Leaf will cost $32,780, but after the federal tax credit of $7,500, and a California state rebate of $5,000 – which the Volt is not eligible for – the actual price will be $20,280. The Leaf also will be eligible for drivers to take into California’s carpool lanes without having more than one passenger, while the Volt will not.

Ginny and John Pauksta of San Jose paid $99 to reserve a Leaf. “The tipping point for me was the BP oil spill, the frustration of what we’re doing to the environment,” said John Pauksta. “It made me very angry. The fact that we’re fighting wars to protect our oil reserves just got to me. Electric cars were like toys, like glorified golf cars and now major car companies are coming out with electric cars that look like real cars.”

“You can fit five people in it and haul stuff around and the driving range is within a level of tolerance”, added Pauksta, who commutes 44 miles daily to his job in Palo Alto.

Instead of the lead acid and nickel-metal hydride batteries that powered the first generation of electric cars like GM’s EV1 in the 1990s, today’s electric car batteries are made of lithium-ion cells, which are now small enough that they can be easily assembled into battery packs and charged using a simple 120-volt outlet, as Pasowatz did with his Chevy Volt, charging it overnight at the conference center.

With the purchase of a Volt, consumers will get a 120-volt portable charge cord set and the option of GM’s 240-volt cord set, which would cut the charging of the vehicle in half, from eight hours to four hours.

Apart from the advancements in battery technology, a perfect storm of factors seems to brewing to usher in a new, more hospitable climate for electric cars, experts at the event, which runs through Thursday, said.

“The technology is moving ahead. The recognition of getting off of oil is important and I think the car is part of the larger energy environment ecosystem, it’s come to that realization that it is time to solve these problems in a systemic way”, said Pasowatz.

According to the Air Resources Board, there are roughly 20,000 pure electric vehicles in California, including roughly 15,000 small neighborhood electric vehicles that aren’t designed to drive on highways.

Utilities, regulatory agencies and environmental organizations expect those numbers to rise as long as gas prices continue to be high, which makes electricity as a fuel source a particularly attractive option.

“Gasoline is about $3, plus or minus, per gallon,” said Sunil Chhaya, a senior manager at the Electric Power Research Institute in Palo Alto. ”Electricity is about 75 cents per gallon, so when you compare operating costs per mile, it’s about a fourth or a fifth the cost of gasoline.”

As the economy improves and worldwide demand for oil grows, gasoline prices may not stay at the current level.

“We’re not sure what gasoline prices are going to look like in the next five to 10 years and it’s widely expected that those will get on an upward trajectory again and start climbing up and beyond four a gallon,” said Childers. “In that case, we’re talking about a very big price difference for electricity. We actually need that because these electric cars are more expensive to build and buy and the only way consumers can afford it is by saving money on fuel."

Moreover, California’s grid, with its mix of hydroelectric power, nuclear power and renewables like solar and wind power, is also cleaner than the nation’s grid — which relies more heavily on power from coal-fired plants. So environmental benefits accrue when drivers plug-in to the grid to charge their vehicles. Chhaya said that “50 to 60 percent of the CO2 emissions can be reduced by using a battery electric vehicle plugged into the state’s grid.”

Still, a big factor for consumers is the sticker price of electric cars. Palo Alto-based Tesla motors offers currently only one electric vehicle line, its sporty Roadster that retails for more than $100,000.

Availability of public charging stations has also been a challenge.

Earlier this year, however, Campbell-based Coulomb Technologies received a $37 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to build 4,600 charging stations in nine metro areas, including San Francisco, San Jose, Sacramento and Los Angeles by September 2011. The charging stations will also feature a new connecting standard adopted in January by the Society of Automotive Engineers so that any electric car can be charged at the charging stations.

For consumers like Kadife Besir-Dunlap, a schoolteacher from Woodland, neither the Chevy Volt nor the Nissan Leaf can compare to her beloved EV1 which was reclaimed by GM in 2002 when her two-year lease expired and GM refused to renew the lease for her or other EV1 owners.

“The Volt is a plug-in, it’s not full electric,” she said. “The car of the future is powered by the fuels of Jurassic time. My frustration is renewed right now. GM could have produced another electric vehicle. They had the technology and a really nice car with the EV1 and they could have reproduced something like that, a more affordable full electric car. A hybrid car is not progress, it’s stagnation.”

Since the tow truck took away her family’s EV1, Besir-Dunlap has been driving an all-electric Toyota RAV4. Earlier this month, under a partnership with Tesla Motors, Toyota announced plans to start production up again on the all-electric RAV4 in 2012 at the NUMMI auto plant in Fremont.

Still, some people at the conference couldn’t wait to plug-in and drive.

“I see nothing but increases in gas prices so I want to get out of the polluting, expensive internal combustion world and into the less expensive, less polluting world of electric vehicles,” said Jared Alaqua, a 28 year-old Novato resident pursuing his M.B.A. “And I hear that they actually perform better.”

Check out these QUEST resources for related information:

Waiting for the Electric Car

Plug-in Hybrids

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It is especially hard to understand when there is ample evidence that there are plenty of innocents in prison. And when a DNA test can prove so conclusive in showing their innocence.

A case I use in a high school activity (and which will be highlighted in the new Technology Benefiting Humanity exhibition at The Tech) involves Marvin Anderson. He is an African American who was convicted of rape by an all white jury in the South.

Court TV produced a great documentary that details all of the mistakes that sent Marvin to prison. And how the Virginia state government, much like our current Supreme Court, fought the simple DNA test that eventually proved his innocence.

Marvin was a suspect because he had a white girlfriend and the rapist had said that he had a white girlfriend during the attack. In a photo line up, Marvin’s was the only picture in color. Then, in the real line up, Marvin was the only man who had been shown in the photo line up.

Marvin’s lawyer represented the man who had really committed the crime. The trial lasted one day and as I said, Marvin was sent to jail by an all white jury. And while Marvin languished in prison, the real rapist confessed but the judge threw out the confession.

This is when the Innocence Project took up the case. The Innocence Project uses genetic testing to free innocent men and women. After hearing the details of Marvin’s case, they decided to help him clear his name. And it was not easy!

First off, they had to find the evidence from the case. This is often hard to do because evidence gets thrown away after a certain amount of time.

But, by a miraculous fluke, the Virginia government found the evidence from the rape kit… it had been saved in a lab notebook. So all that needed to be done was to see if the DNA from the crime scene matched Marvin's. If it didn’t, then Marvin most likely was innocent.

But the Virginia government would not allow the evidence to be tested. Apparently, just like the Supreme Court, procedure mattered more than innocence to the bureaucrats involved.

How many people like Marvin Anderson are waiting for the justice system to do the right thing?
Finally, in 2001, after Marvin had been in jail for 15 years and spent four years on parole, Virginia passed an Innocence Project backed statute that allowed DNA evidence to be tested in some cases. Marvin’s was the first evidence tested under the new statute. He was found to be innocent and the police were able to use the evidence to catch the real rapist.

If the Virginia government had not done the right thing, the real rapist would be free to continue committing crimes. And everyone would still see Marvin as a rapist.

There are undoubtedly Marvins rotting in jail in the three states that don’t allow for genetic testing after a conviction (Alaska, Oklahoma, and Massachusetts). And other Marvins are probably in those other states that only allow genetic testing in certain situations.

The Supreme Court could have given all of these innocent people the chance that Marvin finally got after 19 years. But five justices decided against doing that.

Now I suppose there is probably some legalese reason why the Supreme Court ruled that innocent people should stay locked up. But I am not lawyer enough to understand it. And neither are the Marvins still out there, waiting for justice.

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In our radio story, we feature the stylishly high tech Vineyard 29 and the Robert Mondavi Winery, but scores of other wineries are using a similar toolbox of technology to help them monitor the soil's water content to grow better grapes. The technology ends up conserving water, too. Remote sensing, ground penetrating radar and satellite technology have helped Mondavi cut back on water use by 30% in recent years.

Winemakers are using some of the same technology that NASA uses to study Mars and engineers use to build hi-rises and freeways. A typical toolbox includes multi-spectral imaging, weather stations, neutron moisture probes, and pressure bombs and there is a plethora of newer technologies in the pipeline. But enough with all the high tech gizmos. How does wine from high tech vines taste? The answer might be found in the success of the winery. Mondavi has won numerous awards over the years and there is a two-year waiting list just to purchase Vineyard 29 wines.

Check out our slide show to see some of these technologies or listen to our radio report on high tech in the vineyards.

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A look into the science of skin.

In an article this week in the New York Times, brainpower was correlated with the complexity of nerve synapses. Leading researcher Dr. Grant, who has studied the interconnectedness of neurons, likened this connection to technology; "From the evolutionary perspective, the big brains of vertebrates not only have more synapses and neurons, but each of these synapses is more powerful – vertebrates have big Internets with big computers and invertebrates have small Internets with small computers." The brain has been made analogous to a computer before in order to study evolutionary adaptation. However, the brain was not the organ being studied, rather it was human skin.

Have you ever wondered why we have hair only on the tops of our heads and the rest of our skin is relatively bare? Why does our skin come in so many pigmentations? And why does our skin sweat? Dr. Nina Jablonski kept asking why and attributes these adaptations to the need to keep our brain cool. I first heard Dr. Nina Jablonski speak about her most recent book, Skin: A Natural History, in early 2007. I was absolutely enthralled and two hours raced by as she articulated her fascination with skin. Dr. Jablonski divulged into why our skin appears and acts the way it does from an evolutionary standpoint. Her findings showed that about two million years ago our ancestors were running long distances in Africa under the heat of the equatorial sun. To keep their brains cool, sweat glands became more prominent. This in turn let brain size expand and evolve. In the fossil record, it shows after this increase in brain size, Homo sapiens left Africa to migrate into Mainland China.

Skin:A Natural History

So skin was an evolutionary adaptation to keep our large brains cool and working effectively. Skin color, Dr. Jablonski surmised, was what regulated our body's reaction to the sun and its rays. Dark skin evolved to protect the body of those of our ancestors close to the equator. Those ancestors further away evolved light skin in order to take in Vitamin D in less sunny climates. After her talk about Rosacea, which is a condition of constant blushing found in Eastern European nationalities, I asked Dr. Jablonski why. She told me this might have been attributed to ancestors of light skin being overly bundled and getting over-heated. It might have been an adaptation to release heat and cool the brain from the only exposed skin.

In her lecture, Dr. Jablonski did not stop with touching upon evolutionary adaptations, she also delved into how we associate and identify through our skin. We decorate our skin, clothe it, paint it, tattoo it, scar and pierce it. She elucidated skin as an intimate connection with the world as well as our presentation of individuality. Skin: A Natural History and Dr. Nina Jablonski have gained national recognition. She was even invited as a guest on the Colbert Report to talk about her findings. It is rumored that she is following up Skin with more in-depth research. Until then, this is an outstanding look at a very under-appreciated organ, one that might have made the complex nuances of our brain and its synapses possible.

Watch Dr. Nina Jablonski on The Colbert Report:

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All during this week, I have been seeing reminders that communication is powering ever new and faster technology while leaving technical carnage in its wake. Pay phones booths with the pay phones ripped out and discarded, corded telephones being thrown away, floppy disks and typewriters being recycled because they are no longer the most efficient devices.

During the Academy move to Golden Gate park, staff has helped the internal Greenteam recycle a quarter ton of e-waste at Green Citizen. Green Citizen is a company that recycles computers and e-waste at a small cost so that electronic components don't end up in landfills. What astonished me when sorting through the recycling was that the items that were being recycled were mainly data storage devices. Floppy disks, slides and CDs stacked up by the thousands. Often I don't think about the technology that has seamlessly molded into my life but in this move, I have thought a lot about how that technology has created a great deal of waste. Companies and individuals are now seeking out more responsible ways of recycling but much of it still ends up in landfills.

In the need to keep up with data storage, archives at the Academy have turned from slides to digital scanning, GPS mapping has replaced paper topography, and Skype is keeping researchers in touch rather than phones. It is so important in research to be able to communicate effectively in the remote field areas as well as with colleagues all over the world. Technology is also growing exponentially. In my lifetime alone, I have seen the Internet created, email, cordless phones, mobile phones and GPS. It is an incredible communication age and how we interact is being re-defined but at what cost? Academy policy over the last decade has been to find ways to either donate computers and technology to third world countries or find means to recycle them here. Researchers have seen first hand where electronics and e-waste can end up and what a horrible impact it can have on the bio-diverse environments.

There is a great detriment to faster and expanding communication. While younger generations excel with the technology, older generations are being alienated with technology that seems foreign. As well, the need and demand for better and faster technology creates a pile of obsolete devices and adds to the environmental crisis. This week one comment gave me pause and really made me reconsider if all this technology is a good thing. I don't have an answer but in my concern for the environment – musing over technology this week has made me reconsider if the need for instant communication outweighs its negative waste impact…

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