bradg's blog

I received a note from Alex McEachern -- one of the godfathers of power quality -- about his latest seminar offering; this time in Boston. Alex has an extensive CV that is easily matched by his story-telling capabilities. Even if you don't know anything about electric power, it's always interesting just listening to him.

Alex is a gentle soul. When we were presenting in the same conference stream on the opening day of the 2000 PQ Conference in Boston, I nervously started off by mentioning a 1999 article in Forbes about the effects of electronic loads and power quality on the electrical grid. I wanted it to be a topical ice breaker before launching into my paper. After my presentation, Alex started his segment by firmly, but politely refuting the references in the Forbes story. He wanted to assure everyone that the article's suppositions were wrong. I felt rather chastened having learned at the feet of the master. He was not trying to find fault with me personally, he just wanted to make sure the issue was presented with all of the available evidence.

Alex was right; the article was typical of the type of bubble hyperbole that existed at the time. Within a year we were both at a much smaller PQ show in Chicago, where Alex received a John Mungenast Power Quality Award, on September 11th, no less. If you're in the electrical design business, be it semiconductor based or not, a day spent with Alex is well worth your money. His company is called Power Standards Lab.

There

Paul McCartney is well known for his causes. On his latest tour he has banned all meat and leather within his retinue. One thing Paul does not seem to support however is the Kyoto Protocol. It seems Paul arranged to have the clouds in St. Petersburg doused with "dry ice" in order to forestall a rain storm. For you people who only learn their science from journalism grads or people who wish they had gotten science degrees; dry ice is Carbon Dioxide. Save the chickens.

I'll be giving a talk at the Power Quality 2004 Conference, part of the PowerSystems World 2004 Exhibition & Conference. It will be held in Chicago, Illinois, at the Navy Pier Convention Center, November 16-18, 2004. This year will mark my 5th presentation at the conference. My topic is; "A Different Approach to Power Quality and Reliability Software".

The preliminary abstract is as follows:

Power quality and electrical system software is locked-in to a 20th century model of delivery. PQ professionals create models, programmers code and users install stand-alone software programs for use on individual computers. Electrical power quality software is mired in a world of monolithic packages that are not adaptable to new data analysis or signal processing techniques. This paper explores a way of presenting power quality analytics as a set of services that can be delivered over a network. Web services provide flexibility, reliability and modularity. A set of web services from one provider can easily be combined or used with services from another. Along with these services must come a new way of looking at data standards. The paper examines ways of moving from file based protocols and looks at how XML, SOAP and data interchange techniques can be exploited in the electrical world. Examples of simple services and a concept for a comprehensive system incorporating typical power quality requirements are presented.

I'm saddened to learn of the death of Brian Linehan. (Celebrity interviewer Brian Linehan dead at 58). Brian was a tower of wit and intelligence in the world of celebrity. His level of  preparation and in-depth research of his subjects left them wondering how he became the proverbial fly-on-the-wall in their lives. He was quintessentially charming and mesmerizing -- his greatest strength as an interviewer. His extended questions often became soliloquies, prompting  me to wonder if Brian liked listening to himself sometimes more than he preferred listening to his guest of the moment.

I'll never forget the extended interview with Brian, conducted by my then girlfriend, on McMaster student radio CFMU-FM in  1978. She turned the tables on Brian, having visited his old neighbourhood in Hamilton, spending hours tracking through archives and old newspapers to uncover never before told stories about Mr. Linehan. He was delighted and truly surprised. I wonder if the station still has that archived.

How tough can a spelling bee be?
You really could make this up, but why would you? Perhaps
we'll have a new disease soon -- "Spelling Bee Anxiety Syndrome". Let's
just put a stop to the whole sorry mess right now....The children.
Think about the children.

Within
seconds of crumpling, Akshay stood up and, to the amazement of the
judges, immediately started spelling his word: "alopecoid," which means
like a fox. He got it perfectly, drawing a standing ovation.

He was led off stage for a medical check and returned for the next
round.

Akshay
made it into the final twosome while sitting on a chair at the
microphone, looking weak, his questions to the judges barely loud
enough to hear.

"To me, that's what you call grit," said Paige Kimble, the bee
director. "It was an extraordinary circumstance."

Thanks to crack research analyst JFB for spotting this on the CNN website.

Is it possible that the marginal cost of everything that can be conveyed by way of information technology is zero? This seems to be the leading characteristic of VoIP. It has been argued that there is no difference between serving web pages and pushing digitized voice through the IP pipe-line. That's true; they're just bits after all. The only thing that any of us seem to be willing to pay for now is bandwidth.

In the new model, the medium is the channel. In times past the medium had both physicality and content. A book can have something or nothing on its pages but it is still recognizable as a book in either case. When one buys a book one is not interested in it as a medium so long as one can discern what is on its pages. We are usually only interested in the message that the book carries, not the merits of its physical package. Traditionally, one could not separate the message of the book from its package however. Now we have technologies that can separate the two. What has been the response? No one wants to pay. On-line, for fee newspapers struggle. Music companies sue kids. E-book sales languish.

Let's posit this notion then. When content can be separated from delivery media, individuals will usually only pay for one of the two. This is the current dilemma of the phone companies. Now that conversation can be digitized and IP'ed, its worth is zero. Only the network carrying those bits has value. If I can 'FWD' or 'Skype' my friends and colleagues for 'free', why would I want to 'phone' them and pay?

It would seem that the best way to preserve a content revenue stream is to make sure that the content and delivery media do not get separated. Books are a good example. Sales are still pretty strong in the book trade, at least compared to the music business. (To digress, it could be shown that the music business is less a victim of downloading, than of its own incompetence.) Copying a book in printed form requires at least as many resources as the original, so it's usually cheaper to just buy the book. Only when publishers charge beyond the threshold of pain for the readership does copying become rampant. Think text books. But what happens when a book can be conveyed digitally? Do we want to pay? Have electronic books in any form been successful? Would you pay to read this blog? Not likely.

This merits greater consderation, so when I get some more time I'll try to expand on these thoughts by way of an article.