Book review/summary: What is Intelligence? by James Flynn

What’s it about: The book "What is Intelligence?" by James Flynn deals with the effect of large increases in intelligence quotient (IQ) test scores over time, the ingredients behind what makes us intelligent, and the influences of our brains, individual differences, and social trends on intelligence. In a nutshell, how can we empower the measurement of intelligence since today’s approach is clearly deficit [my words].

 James R. Flynn, a Professor Emeritus from the University of Otago New Zealand, came to learn about massive gains in IQ over time during his career, after obtaining a large number of IQ datasets. In every western country where IQ tests have been administered since the early 20th century scores on these tests increased by over 30+ points. It is like we all became a lot smarter since our parents’ generation, and our parents became smarter than our parents parents, a phenomenon now named the Flynn effect.

Russian Oil Production to 2020

An overview on Russian Oil Production in the near to mid-term future, written as I wanted to take a closer look at what is going on in the country after following some interesting newsbits. The relevance of Russia is tremendous in the world energy system (and thereby economy) as top 2 producers of crude oil in the world (nearly rivalling Saudi-Arabia), with equally large exports. The article was written for, and published at The Oil Drum.

XML and Python

To obtain more usable process data I am working on extracting parts of XML/Excel/CSV files into a new database format. Process data displays conversions of materials and energy from A to B. Below are some pointers for future reference on XML parsing and importing via python.

Shale Oil: The Latest Insights

I recently attended a meeting on Shale Oil organized by Allen & Overy and their Future Energy Strategies Group in London on 16 October. The summary I wrote with key take-away points is now available at The Oil Drum. 

Thoughts on a Sustainable Human Ecosystem

Here's a post I wrote last year around this time, which still shapes most of my thinking (and activities today), originally posted at The Oil Drum. 

It is clear there are limits to the pollution a given ecosystem can absorb, the level of resources that can be depleted, and debt that can be incurred. Despite concerns of many about these limits we are far from tackling any of these problems on a meaningful scale. The question is why this is the case and if we (the Human Race) have the knowledge and capability to live within such limits on Planet Earth?

Book Review: On Intelligence

On Intelligence - Jeff Hawkins and Sandra Blakeslee

What’s it about: A book from a man who wants to build intelligent machines.  Jeff Hawkins, a computer programmer by background, formed a number of ideas about intelligence from a considerable amount of do it yourself reading. His interest culminated into a neuroscience research center, the Redwood Neuroscience Institute (RNI) in 2002, still alive today. Soon after he founded the company Numenta which is working on Grok – one of the first computer programs geared towards data analysis and automatic model construction to make predictions. This is the core move towards what Jeff sees as the key ingredient of intelligence à the prediction of what will happen in the world around us.

CleanTech Company Listing

Today, I made an inventory of the top 100 startup companies in CleanTech, according to Cleantech Group LLC who publish an update on the world of CleanTech every year. The spreadsheet is accessible via Google Drive. Other lists on the list for an inventory - to be done at some point in future - include Sustainia100  and the Artemistop 50