By: Stephen Drummonsy

Solar panels aren't new. The technology has been around for quite a long time. As all of us are well aware, burning fossil fuels to produce energy isn't doing the natural world much good and increasingly brings us into contact with politically unstable states. And so now could be the moment to perform your bit for your country and fit solar panels to generate electricity!

An electric solar panel uses photovoltaic or PV cells to turn the Sun's energy into electricity. The electricity can then run our lights and devices. A PV panel is constructed from crystalline silicon. Photons from the sun strike the silicon and electricity is generated using the photovoltaic effect.

I can really only think of 2 reasons for installing electric solar panels. This first one is economic and the other one is environmental. Some people install them for environmental reasons. But unless you're Prince Charles or James Lovelock, the majority of us will require a sound economic reason to trigger us in making the investment. Eventually, you may find that having solar panels fitted into your home might well increase it's value. The very next owners will certainly be saving money on their electricity bills.

So, we come to some of the benefits you may enjoy if you decide to put in and use electric solar panels. You can lower your electric bills by around 40% even in the UK.

Solar energy is environmentally friendly. It does not discharge any pollutants including carbon dioxide. Sleep better at night, smug in the warm glow that the contribution to the planet has afforded you. Theoretically, you can actually make some money from your panels by selling excess electricity back to the grid. The power companies are legally obliged to purchase this electricity at an inflated rate. Usually around 18p per KW. You are able to store extra energy in batteries and use them during rainy days or when needed.

Solar panels, correctly installed, will last for over 30 years. Of course, you can find a few things to consider. The solar panels are relatively heavy. You will want to make sure that your roof is robust enough to carry their weight. It is best to consult a construction specialist for proper structural assessment of your roof. You will want to ensure that you have a clear line of sight to the sun. i.e. no buildings, trees, or any structure will block the sunlight going to the panels. This is to capture the highest possible amount of sunlight to generate more electricity. Visit your local planning authority to check if you need permission to install electric solar panels.

The price of putting in an electric solar system differs and depends largely on their size. A typical 2.2 KW solar panel system is priced at about £12,000. The cost of electric solar panel systems per KW range from £4,000 to £8,000. The costs per KW will decrease as the system size increases. Generally speaking, you should see a return on your investment in around 10 years. So, maybe now it's the right time to think about installing some electric solar panels.

Fiddling with electricity can be a very dangerous occupation. When I need any electrical work doing myself I call in a qualified person. I can usually get this person from a good company by using the search term electrician london. I use this term particularly because most of my properties that I own are situated in London.

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By: Edwin Stepp

"The promise of the Information Age is the unleashing of unprecedented productive capacity by the power of the mind. . . . The dream of the Enlightenment, that reason and science would solve the problems of humankind, is within reach."

Such is the optimistic conclusion of Manuel Castells in his massive trilogy, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture. Within the same conclusion, however, this professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, cites as prerequisites many miraculous changes for society and culture in this global social conscience. And the likelihood that these miracles will be realized seems as remote as the Emerald City in The Wizard of Oz.

Consider several "if only" rainbows that society and culture must chase before we can walk the yellow-brick road to Castells's utopia: "If people are informed, [are] active, and communicate throughout the world; if business assumes its social responsibility; if the media become the messengers, rather than the message; if political actors react against cynicism, and restore belief in democracy; . . . if we assert intergenerational solidarity by living in harmony with nature; if we depart for the exploration of our inner self, having made peace among ourselves."

What Castells doesn't seem to realize is that human nature is the wizard behind this curtain, and unfortunately he doesn't see that for what it really is. In his conclusion he states that "there is no eternal evil in human nature." Yet he warns in his third volume that the Information Age has the potential to greatly expand the gap between rich and poor nations, that the weakest in society (especially children) stand to be exploited by the new global economy as never before, and that a rising global criminal economy will wield unprecedented power.

In the same volume he readily admits that "we are all inhabited, at the same time, by humanity's angels and devils, [and] whenever and wherever our dark side takes over it triggers the release of unprecedented, destructive power." Castells is to be applauded for recognizing that human nature is at the crux of the success or failure of the Information Age, but his optimism is not supported by his analysis of these monumental changes. In fact, he identifies the potential for more negative than positive scenarios as the world speeds blindly into what many believe will be the greatest social upheaval in the history of humanity.

To be fair to Castells, he does not intend to suggest a coming utopia. His intent with this work was not to engage in futurology, but to present the situation as it presently exists and to identify the social and economic factors that would be most affected by the technological revolution. He acknowledges his optimism but defends it when he writes, "I believe in rationality . . . without worshipping its goddess. I believe in the chances of meaningful social action . . . without necessarily drifting towards the deadly rapids of absolute utopias." The question that remains is whether the new technologies will bring society and culture a better world or whether they will be used for destruction, as were all too many technological advances in the 20th century.

NETWORK VS IDENTITY

Castells will certainly have a major impact on the debate about what traditional institutions should or should not do to influence the progress of the Information Revolution. The author of more than 20 books, many dealing with the impact of information technology on society, he is recognized by business leaders and academicians alike as the premier expert on the social ramifications of the Information Age.

Castells has long been a citizen of the subject on which he is an expert--the new global economy and culture. He himself is a globalized social theorist. Born in Spain in 1942, he taught at the University of Paris for 12 years before moving to California. He has taught and conducted research all over the world and has been an advisor to heads of state from Europe to Latin America to Asia. He has been a member of the European Commission's High Level Expert Group on the Information Society and is a member of the European Academy.

In the last year, Castells has also become a star speaker at major conferences on the Information Age. He was one of a very few academics to address the World Economic Forum earlier this year, with an audience that included George Soros, Bill Gates and Kofi Annan.

In his trilogy, Castells describes a tension that new information technologies have created within the society and culture. He identifies it as a battle between "network" and "identity."

Volume One is titled The Rise of the Network Society. In it he introduces a new term, informationalism--a new economic model evolved from capitalism. In the new economy, information is the most important currency, and new models of production are forming as a result. Castells illustrates how the global economy is now reliant on the continuous and instantaneous flow of information, and how that flow has changed consumption and production. Enormous power has been invested in those who control the information pipelines, and very often that power goes politically and legally unchecked.

Volume Two, titled The Power of Identity, shows the major counterforce to networks and globalization: old and new groups expressing their collective identity. Here Castells identifies social (and to a lesser degree economic) communities that are emerging, and he comments on their shifting and transitory nature and how they are undermining the old structures, including ethnic cultures, the family and the nation-state.

In his final volume, End of Millennium, Castells brings together the findings from the first two and sums up where he believes society and culture is as it enters a new millennium. And while he focuses on Africa, the rise of inequality, the growing criminal economy, urban poverty, and the plight of children, he still has faith that "there is nothing that cannot be changed by conscious, purposive social action" that is informed and legitimate. Yet he resists making firm predictions and concentrates on, as he puts it, "what we know the Information Age brings to us."

EMPIRICAL WEAKNESS

The three volumes work together to establish the fact that a new global economy and culture are emerging, driven by the engine of capitalism. This new state of affairs will in turn come under threat from the pressure of other social movements, ethnic groups and virtual cultures that are arising in response to the rapid shrinking of the globe. All of these forces will utilize the speed and pervasiveness of the network to stake out, defend and promote their identity. Information capitalists, nation-states and traditional institutions will have to take each potential threat seriously, no matter how insignificant it may seem initially.

Castells cites the success of the Mexican Zapatistas rebellion as evidence. This relatively small and isolated group, devoted to preserving the culture of those native people of Mexico who were threatened by global interests such as NAFTA, was able to hold the Mexican government at bay by appealing to the greater global community for support via the Internet.

Yet it seems the new technologies put all entities at risk. The very same special-interest groups and individuals that are empowered by unlimited information will also have their identity threatened by competing social movements. Thus no one will have a secure sense of identity.

It is no surprise that Castells, a former Marxist, concentrates on the plight of workers through all of this change. He believes a major consequence will be great uncertainty in employment resulting from a dramatic change in how we work: labor pools will be defined increasingly by temporary ventures that Castells terms "projects"; corporate firms and businesses will constantly shift their focus; and many firms will become sources of capital as opposed to producers of goods and services in the traditional sense. These factors may work together to produce a situation not unlike that of the 19th century, when vast groups of people were uprooted to fulfill the labor needs created by the Industrial Revolution.

These are just a few of the general trends that Castells attempts to identify. While the three volumes are long on data and short on firm conclusions about the future, the specifics he addresses in illustrating his points make for interesting reading and prompt the reader to consider various what-if scenarios. But one comes away from the trilogy recognizing that the subject is so big that even the best minds writing in such magna opera as Castells's are incapable of giving us the full sense of the revolution we are witnessing.

The advance of the Information Age is in many ways like the development of a new empire, though this empire is not limited, as others before it have been, to time and space.

Several questions remain, however. At what stage are we currently in the life of this new global empire? Will the global economy and culture prevail, or will society fragment? Can the dark side of human nature be overcome before the full power of the Information Age is unleashed? This is the drama for which Castells wisely refuses to provide an ending.

So often in the past, the real enemy of empires was not the foe without but the dark side of human nature within. More often than not, empires collapsed because of internal social forces at work--the moral decline and eventual collapse of the Roman Empire being perhaps the most notable example.

The astonishing powers being unleashed by the explosion of information technologies will demand strong ethics and morality from the citizens of this new global empire if it is to enjoy a happier fate.

Author, Edwin Stepp, is Director of Development for Vision Media. More information about these and other article topics can be found at http://www.vision.org.

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By: Joey Clonch

Imagine an expedition to the Antarctic in 1914. There is no GPS, no world-reaching radio, and no satellite phone. Brutal conditions, rationed food, tight living quarters. Sounds pretty bleak. Now imagine that something goes horribly wrong. As days turn into weeks the rationed food is exhausted. As weeks turn into months hope is all that is left. When hope diminishes, all that is left is the will to live.

Sir Ernest Shackleton's 1914 voyage turned into a disaster just before he and his crew of twenty-eight could reach Antarctica. Their ship The Endurance was held up by ice for ten months and then crushed by it's frozen, unforgiving force, and that is just the beginning of this two-years long journey. It is amazing what he and his crew endure over this time period just to survive.

This is an excerpt from a diary kept by crewman Thomas Orde-Lees that recounts a very cold and desperate time some six months after the men abandoned the crumpled, mangled wreckage of their ship on three lifeboats.

"As the water splashed into the boats it froze instantly forming thick incrustations of ice on the inside of the boat and over all the gear freezing up the sail as stiff as a piece of corrugated iron. Fortunately the water which ran into the bottom of the boat did not freeze at once so that by frequent bailing we were able to keep pace with it and prevent the accumulation of ice along the keels, where, had it once formed, it would have been next to impossible to eradicate it on account of the cargo.

Much sleet covered us, and what with this and the sea spray we were all more or less wet through and our outer clothing was frozen stiff. Our time was largely occupied in picking the ice off each other's backs. It would be a lie to say that we were at all happy under these circumstances but now and again we made a feeble effort to assume a cheerful, hopeful air in spite of ourselves. We were being sorely tried, indeed, though."

For more on this event and to learn about a documentary film based on this event visit:
film-documentary.com/the-endurance.html

Author Bio Joey is a writer at http://film-documentary.com

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By: Charles Bloom

In 1960, a quadruple murder occurred in a small rural Kansas town. The murder of the well-liked Clutter family devastated the tiny community of Holcomb, Kansas. But it was not until a curious pair of eyes spied the crime report in the New York Times that the case gained nationwide notoriety. Outgoing novelist and playwright Truman Capote spent six years of his life exhaustively researching this then-obscure case and turning it into a novel called In Cold Blood. With the help of his dear friend Harper Lee, he explored even the most minute details of a gruesome four-victim homicide in the sleepy town. Capote arrived in the town early enough that he was able to record the chronicle of the events - the investigation, arrests, and subsequent trial - while they occurred in real life.

By: Michael Strauss

Last December ('05), physicists held the 23rd Solvay Conference in Brussels, Belgium. Amongst the many topics covered in the conference was the subject matter of string theory. This theory combines the apparently irreconcilable domains of quantum physics and relativity. David Gross a Nobel Laureate made some startling statements about the state of physics including: "We don't know what we are talking about" whilst referring to string theory as well as "The state of physics today is like it was when we were mystified by radioactivity."

The Nobel Laureate is a heavyweight in this field having earned a prize for work on the strong nuclear force and he indicated that what is happening today is very similar to what happened at the 1911 Solvay meeting. Back then, radioactivity had recently been discovered and mass energy conservation was under assault because of its discovery. Quantum theory would be needed to solve these problems. Gross further commented that in 1911 "They were missing something absolutely fundamental," as well as "we are missing perhaps something as profound as they were back then."

Coming from a scientist with establishment credentials this is a damning statement about the state of current theoretical models and most notably string theory. This theoretical model is a means by which physicists replace the more commonly known particles of particle physics with one dimensional objects which are known as strings. These bizarre objects were first detected in 1968 through the insight and work of Gabriele Veneziano who was trying to comprehend the strong nuclear force.

Whilst meditating on the strong nuclear force Veneziano detected a similarity between the Euler Beta Function, named for the famed mathematician Leonhard Euler, and the strong force. Applying the aforementioned Beta Function to the strong force he was able to validate a direct correlation between the two. Interestingly enough, no one knew why Euler's Beta worked so well in mapping the strong nuclear force data. A proposed solution to this dilemma would follow a few years later.

Almost two years later (1970), the scientists Nambu, Nielsen and Susskind provided a mathematical description which described the physical phenomena of why Euler's Beta served as a graphical outline for the strong nuclear force. By modeling the strong nuclear forces as one dimensional strings they were able to show why it all seemed to work so well. However, several troubling inconsistencies were immediately seen on the horizon. The new theory had attached to it many implications that were in direct violation of empirical analyses. In other words, routine experimentation did not back up the new theory.

Needless to say, physicists romantic fascination with string theory ended almost as fast as it had begun only to be resuscitated a few years later by another 'discovery.' The worker of the miraculous salvation of the sweet dreams of modern physicists was known as the graviton. This elementary particle allegedly communicates gravitational forces throughout the universe.

The graviton is of course a 'hypothetical' particle that appears in what are known as quantum gravity systems. Unfortunately, the graviton has never ever been detected; it is as previously indicated a 'mythical' particle that fills the mind of the theorist with dreams of golden Nobel Prizes and perhaps his or her name on the periodic table of elements.

But back to the historical record. In 1974, the scientists Schwarz, Scherk and Yoneya reexamined strings so that the textures or patterns of strings and their associated vibrational properties were connected to the aforementioned 'graviton.' As a result of these investigations was born what is now called 'bosonic string theory' which is the 'in vogue' version of this theory. Having both open and closed strings as well as many new important problems which gave rise to unforeseen instabilities.

These problematical instabilities leading to many new difficulties which render the previous thinking as confused as we were when we started this discussion. Of course this all started from undetectable gravitons which arise from other theories equally untenable and inexplicable and so on. Thus was born string theory which was hoped would provide a complete picture of the basic fundamental principles of the universe.

Scientists had believed that once the shortcomings of particle physics had been left behind by the adoption of the exotic string theory, that a grand unified theory of everything would be an easily ascertainable goal. However, what they could not anticipate is that the theory that they hoped would produce a theory of everything would leave them more confused and frustrated than they were before they departed from particle physics.

The end result of string theory is that we know less and less and are becoming more and more confused. Of course, the argument could be made that further investigations will yield more relevant data whereby we will tweak the model to an eventual perfecting of our understanding of it. Or perhaps 'We don't know what we are talking about.'

Author Bio
Michael Strauss is an engineer and author of Requiem for Relativity the Collapse of Special Relativity. To contact the author visit: www.relativitycollapse.com

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