adria optimal: October 2012

Friday, October 26, 2012

Lolo Jones selected to US bobsled team

Lolo Jones agreed to try bobsledding because she needed something to take her mind off the rigors of her Olympic track season.

Three weeks later, she's got a spot on the national team.

Jones, a two-time Olympic hurdler, was one of 24 athletes selected to the U.S. bobsled team Thursday. She's one of six women's push athletes selected, a group that also includes Olympic sprinting gold medalist Tianna Madison.

"I just came out here and kind of needed to get away from track for a bit, kind of wanted to get some motivation," Jones told The Associated Press. "I thought coming out here with the other girls that we could help each other, we could benefit from one another. I could help them with their speed and they could help me with my strength. And just being around them, hearing their goals gave me new goals and refreshed me."

Jones was fourth at the London Games, the second time she's gone to an Olympics and come home without a hurdles medal. She was the favorite for gold at Beijing in 2008, then hit the next-to-last hurdle and finished seventh.

She still plans to compete in hurdles at the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics. Only now, a trip to the 2014 Sochi Games ? in a bobsled ? might come first.

"This is a breath of fresh air ? cool, very cool, cold air," Jones said.

Jones and Madison were among a small number of track athletes invited to Lake Placid for bobsled's push championships this month by U.S. coach Todd Hays. He believed veteran Olympians would, if nothing else, help some of the team's younger competitors and raise team morale.

But Hays also had another idea in mind ? recruitment. Bobsled has long sought athletes from the track world, with their strength and explosiveness considered the perfect combination to get a sled going quickly down an icy chute.

Madison, who was part of a world-record-setting 4x100-meter relay Olympic win in London, and Jones fit what Hays was looking for. Neither had done any real training since the London Games, so the last three weeks have been hectic for Madison and Jones.

"Once they were revved up, things started clicking for both of us," Jones said. "It kind of overwhelmed us quite quickly."

Both bring star power. Jones brings an element of celebrity as well.

This summer in London, Jones competed amid criticism, even from some teammates, that she received more attention and endorsements than her accomplishments on the track warranted. One of the things she said attracted her to bobsledding was that, traditionally, it's the pilot ? not the push athlete ? who gets virtually all the attention after races.

If that holds true, Jones might be thrilled.

"When I came here, I didn't want any distractions," Jones said.

Madison ran the opening leg of the gold-winning relay in London, one that smashed the record held by East Germany for 27 years.

Other women in the push-athlete mix are 2010 Olympian Emily Azevedo, world championship medalist Katie Eberling, Lake Placid start-record-holder Aja Evans and former Cal track athlete Cherrelle Garrett.

Three women's pilots are on the roster: reigning world championships bronze medalist Elana Meyers will drive USA-1, Jamie Greubel will drive USA-2 and Jazmine Fenlator will be at the controls of USA-3. Coaches will likely determine next week which three push athletes work with the drivers for the first World Cup event of the season. Because that's six women vying for three roles, there's no guarantee that Jones or Madison would start on the World Cup circuit.

The men's roster had few surprises. World and Olympic champion Steven Holcomb will drive USA-1, with Nick Cunningham in USA-2 and Cory Butner in USA-3.

Push athletes Steve Langton, Justin Olsen and Curt Tomasevicz helped the "Night Train" sled driven by Holcomb to the world title last year, and all are back this season. Coaches chose nine other men's push athletes as well: Adam Clark, Johnny Quinn, Chuck Berkeley, Laszlo Vandracsek, Chris Fogt, Dallas Robinson, Jesse Beckom, Andreas Drbal and Nic Taylor.

The U.S. skeleton roster will be announced next week after team selection races end in Park City, Utah. World Cup racing for bobsled and skeleton opens in Lake Placid on Nov. 8.

"It was definitely a thrill," Jones said. "This is definitely the first time I've made a team and I haven't had to cross the finish line and look at the scoreboard."

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/lolo-jones-selected-us-bobsled-team-134204036--spt.html

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IDC: Samsung and Apple still kings of the smartphone market, Nokia loses top five spot to RIM

IDC's third quarter figures are in, complete with a few unexpected shake-ups. The entire cellphone market grew 2.4% over the same time last year, but smartphones drove the majority of that, showing growth of 45.3% and beating the analysts' expectations. Of the 179.7 million smartphones shipped, Samsung and Apple devices accounted for almost half of them, with the companies retaining their number one and two positions in the market, respectively. IDC notes that iPhone shipments didn't increase, but this is somewhat expected given the latest iteration was released only a short time before the end of the quarter. What we find particularly interesting is that Nokia was ousted from the top five smartphone players and replaced by RIM. Whether Nokia's upcoming Windows Phone 8 devices will put it back in contention remains to be seen, as does the effect BB10 and RIM's new handsets will have on the market. ZTE finished fourth in the list thanks to increased sales in North America, with HTC rounding up the top five vendors with continued uptake of its power devices. With a bunch of new handsets coming to the table and the holiday season fast approaching, look out for even more surprises in the fourth quarter numbers, due early next year.

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile, Apple, Samsung, HTC, Nokia, RIM

IDC: Samsung and Apple still kings of the smartphone market, Nokia loses top five spot to RIM originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 26 Oct 2012 03:56:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/kEOPB2LEDd0/

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Friday, October 5, 2012

Ghana's best shot at going green: sewage power

How might the world's poorest continent go green? Kwabena Otu-Danquah's job is to crack that riddle. The renewable energy czar for Ghana ranks among the handful of bureaucrats across Africa tasked with picking which forms of green energy might prove affordable on a continent where most people don't pay for the electricity they sometimes receive.

Last year the Ghanaian parliament signed a pledge to derive 10 percent of the country's electricity from alternative sources come 2020. Mr. Otu-Danquah is still trying to figure out which alternatives.

Sun? Forget it. Solar costs 40 cents to 50 cents a kilowatt hour, while Ghanaians pay just 5 cents to 10 cents for electricity from conventional sources. Wind? Too slow. Breeze ambles through this tropical doldrum at a leisurely average of five kilometers an hour (3.2 miles per hour). How about jatropha, a local flower Goldman Sachs pitched as the next fad biofuel? Ghana tried that. As growers mowed down farms to plant nuts for fuel, drought-battered countries to Ghana's north complained of food price spikes in some of the world's hungriest villages.

RELATED ? Top 5 nations that use renewable energy

That's forced Ghana to consider a more imaginative set of choices. Among them, sewage. Flush with a $1.5 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, local Waste Enterprisers Ltd. is building Ghana's first "fecal sludge-fed biodiesel plant." That's longhand for cooking human excrement into generator fuel, Chief Operating Officer Tim Wade explains. The transformation would serve a dual purpose. Open sewers sweep 1,000 tons of slurry each day into the ocean off Accra, spewing an ocean-top brown slick that is visible on Google Earth. Outside the upland city of Kumasi, roughly 100 trucks dump tens of thousands of liters of septic tank sewage daily into what used to be a small pond.

Luckily, nobody bothers to treat that slop. Sewage treatment plants, as far as Mr. Wade is concerned, frivol away the good stuff. If all goes according to plan, next month one truck a day from Kumasi will dump its payload into a warm and massive vat that will skim lipids ? fat ? off the top. ?That's your biodeisel,? he explains.

At $7 a gallon, he can sell the muck to local mining companies, who are keen to buy because they too have been required by parliament to power 10 percent of their private electric plants from green sources. Normal diesel does sells a few bucks cheaper, he admits, ?But we're still optimizing the process.? If he can get costs down, Mr. Wade intends to build four plants in Accra and lecture sub-divisions back home in Colorado on the folly of treating their waste.

ALTERNATIVES TO THE ALTERNATIVES

There are more sanitary ways to make a megawatt in this country. Kwame Tufor came home from Florida to liquefy Ghana's coconut husks, cocoa pods, and palm nut shells into gas. But you'd need a lot of coconuts to turn a profit that way. So he and a business partner are eyeing an old paper farm the size of Brooklyn. Sometime between one 1970s coup and another, the owner ran out of money and political favor, abandoning acres of trees that were meant to be mulched into notepads 35 years ago.

Mr. Tufor intends to saw those trees down, replant them, then burn the timber and compress the smoke into a biofuel using dated World War II technology that's been dusted off by developing world power plants. At least 10 plants in China now gasify coal this way. Farmers in the Philippines run irrigation pumps on generators that gasify rice husks. If Mr. Tufor's $200 million project pans out, local farmers would also sell him their nut shells and cocoa pods for his incinerator.

Odder sources of energy are under review. They include leftovers. Ghana's trash, it seems, boasts curiously high food content ? edibles account for 60 percent of this country's rubbish, according to Senior Researcher Robert Adu at England's De Montfort University, Leicester. He's finishing a technical proposal on how to goose a charge out of Ghana's garbage. One thing Ghana's got going for it: Locals love rice. One kilogram of the staple grain, Mr. Adu says, packs 17 kilojoules, a flicker compared to a kilo of kerosene, but great compared to a vegetable.

SUBSIDIZING TRASH

Ghana's government offers a subsidy for companies that can produce renewable energy at a cost closer to the African pay scale. For Mr. Adu, that means it might just be profitable to feed tons of rotten groceries everyday into a fire that would boil a tank of water whose steam would lurch a turbine forward. The trouble? How to cull the grub from the garbage. Trash separation schemes do exist; Mr. Adu says he's reading a book on them. He points to a plant in Germany that's mastered the technique through a process made profitable by sales of hot air, a byproduct, to heat homes in wintertime. If Mr. Adu goes that route, he'll have to find buyers looking to purchase hot air in the tropics.

Mr. Otu-Danquah isn't quite sure will this burst of invention will wind up: At the day's end, economics on what Ghanaians and their government can afford will surely dash some dreams. But the proposals make for more interesting reading, he says, than the stack of hackneyed solar plant schemes he's stuffed into a corner. Plus, some big break just might occur.

?When the time comes,? he says. ?we will have learned our lessons and developed our own technology.? At the very least, he adds, Accra might enjoy cleaner streets, cleaner sewers.