MAR 30, 2011

Effects of Crude Oil Supply Disruptions: How Long Can They Last?

Recent events in the Middle East and North Africa region have unsettled an already tightening oil market, leaving market participants to evaluate and cope with the possible short- and long-term effects of both current and potential supply disruptions. While events that cause oil disruptions may be transitory, their impact on oil production levels can persist for an extended period. Past experience suggests that the absences of internal discord and external conflicts or sanctions are important conditions for a recovery in production.

This edition of Today in Energy reviews the gross production impacts of three past disruptions: the Iranian revolution of 1978-1979, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990, and the Venezuelan strike in 2002. Historically, the disrupted volumes are initially replaced mainly with the drawdown of inventories and then with increased production from other countries that have the capacity to increase output quickly. When new production arrives to help replace lost supplies, we can lose sight of the length of the loss from the disruption and subsequent events.

The Iranian revolution, which began in late 1978, resulted in an average drop of 3.9 million barrels per day (MMbbl/d) in Iran's crude oil production over the 1978 to 1981 period, with the initial supply loss reaching nearly 90 percent of total Iranian production in January 1979. However, much of this lost production was offset by increases in output from other Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) members, particularly from Iran's Persian Gulf neighbors. While some of Iran's production returned within two years, Iran's production in 2010 was more than 1.5 MMbbl/d below its average level in 1977, the year before the revolution began. Similarly, when Iraq invaded Kuwait on August 2, 1990, oil supplies from these two countries were disrupted, causing a sudden crude oil price run-up. Immediately following the invasion, nearly all of Kuwait's and Iraq's oil production was taken offline. The peak lost production of about 4.3 MMbbl/d of combined Iraqi and Kuwaiti crude oil tested markets.

While Kuwait's oil wells suffered extensive damage from sabotage by retreating Iraqi forces, the country emerged from the war free of both internal discord and external interference with its recovery efforts, which began immediately following the withdrawal of Iraqi forces. That created a favorable environment for a recovery of production. Despite the significant field damage, average annual Kuwaiti oil production exceeded pre-disruption levels in less than four years. In contrast, Iraq, which has at various times over the past 20 years faced external sanctions, war, and internal strife, has not seen its production fully recover. In 2010, Iraq's production averaged 2.4 MMbbl/d, compared with 3.5 MMbbl/d, the pre-disruption 1990 monthly peak.

The December 2002 Venezuelan strike initially disrupted two-thirds of Venezuela's 3.0 MMbbl/d November 2002 production. OPEC members Saudi Arabia and Kuwait have crude oils similar in quality to the Venezuelan crude oils, and, following the strike, these countries increased production to partially offset Venezuelan losses. Within a year, Venezuelan production returned to about 85 percent of its pre-strike level. While the strike officially ended in February 2003, Venezuela's production has never returned to its pre-strike level. EIA estimates Venezuela's current production at roughly 2.1 MMbbl/d.

Past events may not be an indication of how long it will take to restore Libya's production, currently estimated to be at a near-complete shut-in. The extent and duration of Libya's supply disruption will depend on several factors. Much will depend on the political outcome and the acceptance of the government in power by both the Libyan people and the international community following the end of hostilities. Sanctions would need to be lifted to allow for international participation (both in terms of investment and trade) in Libya's oil sector. Following commercial and contractual negotiations, any infrastructure that has been damaged will have to be repaired and the knowledge base will have to return to the country before production can begin to ramp up. In light of these considerations, it is not surprising that the world crude market still reflects large uncertainties.

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Probe captures high-resolution images of nanomaterials

March 30, 2011

Scientists at Berkeley Lab’s Molecular Foundry have pioneered a new chemical mapping method that provides unprecedented insight into materials at the nanoscale, says Alexander Weber-Bargioni, a postdoctoral scholar in the Imaging and Manipulation of Nanostructures Facility at the Foundry.

The team designed and fabricated a coaxial antenna capable of focusing light at the nanoscale using a state-of-the-art focused ion beam tool. The antenna consists of gold wrapped around a silicon nitride atomic force microscope (AFM) tip and serves as an optical probe for structures, with 20-nanometer resolution.

The probe provides enough enhancement to report the chemical fingerprint at each pixel while collecting an image (typically 256 x 256 pixels). This data is then used to generate multiple composition-related “maps,” each with a wealth of chemical information at every pixel.

To test out the capability of the new probe, the team examined carbon nanotubes, which are ideal for this type of interactive investigation because their unmatched electronic and structural properties are sensitive to localized chemical changes.

Researchers seeking information about light-harvesting materials or any dynamic system should benefit from this imaging system, says Weber-Bargioni.

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First perovskite-based superlens for the infrared

March 30, 2011

Researchers with Berkeley Lab have fabricated superlenses from materials that are  simpler and easier to fabricate than metamaterials.

The superlenses are ideal for capturing light in the mid-infrared range (for infrared spectroscopy and thermal sensors, for example), says Ramamoorthy Ramesh, a materials scientist with Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division and colleague S.C. Kehr at the University of Saint Andrews in the UK.

The perovskites used to make the superlens, bismuth ferrite and strontium titan­ate, feature a low rate of photon absorption and can be grown as epitaxial multilayers with a highly crystalline quality that reduces interface roughness so there are few photons lost to scattering.

This combination of low absorption and scattering losses significantly improves the imaging resolution of the superlens.

The combination of near-field infrared microscopy and tunable free-electron laser provides the first detailed study of the spatial and spectral near-field responses of the superlens, using a near-field scattering probe (a metal-coated atomic-force microscope tip with a typical radius of 50 nanometers).

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Battery uses salinity difference between freshwater and saltwater

March 30, 2011

Researchers at Stanford University have developed a battery that takes advantage of the difference in salinity between freshwater and seawater to produce electricity, says Yi Cui, associate professor of materials science and engineering, who led the research team.

The battery consists of two electrodes (one positive, one negative) immersed in an electrolyte with sodium and chlorine ions, the components of ordinary table salt.

The battery is filled with freshwater and a small electric current is applied to charge it up. The freshwater is then drained and replaced with seawater. Because seawater is salty, containing 60 to 100 times more ions than freshwater, it increases the  voltage between the two electrodes.

Cui’s team calculated that if all the world’s rivers were put to use, their batteries could supply about 2 terawatts of electricity annually, roughly 13 percent of the world’s current energy consumption.

A power plant operating with 50 cubic meters of freshwater per second could produce up to 100 megawatts of power, according to the team’s calculations. That would be enough to provide electricity for about 100,000 households, says Cui.

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Confidence Slips Away as Japan Battles Nuclear Peril

By KEN BELSON and HIROKO TABUCHI

TOKYO — After workers switched on the first set of control room lights at Japan’s crippled power plant in Fukushima last week, the Japanese government offered its strongest assurances yet that its nuclear crisis was close to being under control.

Heroic workers and firefighters continued to cool the volatile reactors by pumping in hundreds of tons of water a day. Much-awaited electricity had reached the plant after a rush to extend new power lines, ready to hook up to vital cooling systems and guide the plant to a long-term “cold shutdown.”

But less than a week later, a deluge of contaminated water, plutonium traces in the soil and an increasingly hazardous environment for workers at the plant have forced government officials to confront the reality that the emergency measures they have taken to keep nuclear fuel cool are producing increasingly dangerous side effects. And the prospect of restoring automatic cooling systems anytime soon is fading.

The recent flow of bad news from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station has undermined the drumbeat of optimistic statements by government and company officials who have at times tried to reassure a nervous public that significant progress is at hand — only to come up short.

“The earthquake, tsunami and the ensuing nuclear accident may be Japan’s largest-ever crisis,” the Japanese prime minister, Naoto Kan, told Parliament on Tuesday, in his most sober message to date on the nuclear crisis. “We find ourselves in a situation where we can’t let down our guard. We will continue to handle it in a state of maximum alert.”

The setbacks have raised questions about how long, and at what cost, Japan can keep up what experts call its “feed and bleed” strategy of cooling the reactor’ fuel rods with emergency infusions of water from the ocean and now from freshwater sources.

That cooling strategy, while essential to prevent full meltdowns, has released harmful amounts of radioactive steam into the atmosphere and set off leaks of highly contaminated water, making it perilous for some of the hundreds of workers at the plant to further critical repair work.

Moreover, the discovery of radioactive elements that experts say could come only from the core of a reactor suggest that the government’s strategy may not be working and that partial fuel melting has not been completely halted.

The continuing crisis also underscores the unprecedented scale and complexity of the problems facing Fukushima: a plant ravaged by a magnitude-9.0 earthquake and 45-foot tsunami, and three reactors and four spent fuel pools with no proper cooling system yet and containing more long-lived radioactivity than the Chernobyl reactor, according to the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, based in Takoma Park, Md.

This is why, despite the damage caused by the efforts so far, Japanese officials have little choice but to continue down the feed-and-bleed path. “The worst-case scenario is that a meltdown makes the plant’s site a permanent grave,” said Tetsuo Iguchi, a professor in the department of quantum engineering at Nagoya University. “In a small island nation like Japan, that’s just not an option. That is why the government is trying to prevent a meltdown at any cost.”

The events have been a quick turn for the worse for the Japanese government. Just last week, officials at Tokyo Electric Power Company, the Fukushima Daiichi plant’s operator, repeatedly hailed the extension of electrical wires to the plant, spoke of resuming electrically operated cooling systems and offered assurances that the situation would not get worse.

But late last week, three workers in a building next to Reactor No. 3 were injured when they stepped in contaminated water. Radioactive water was later discovered at two other reactors, making some areas of the reactor buildings dangerous for workers to approach.

Some of that water in the reactor structures also appears to be leaking out through damaged pipes or vessels, forming highly contaminated pools at the bottom of the turbine buildings adjacent to the reactors. On Tuesday, workers were forced to divert their attention to readying sandbags and pumps after the contaminated water was discovered in a tunnel leading close to the sea.

Compounding the matter, the government said Tuesday that the recent discovery of plutonium in the soil at the plant provided new evidence that at least one reactor was experiencing melting of its nuclear fuel, as happened in the early days of the crisis.

While the source of the plutonium found at the plant was unclear, all three kinds of nuclear fuel at the complex could leak plutonium.

Fresh signs of radiation leaks have raised questions about the sustainability of the government’s feed-and-bleed approach.

One major problem, said Murray E. Jennex, an associate professor at San Diego State University with 20 years of experience in examining nuclear containment structures, was that all the water the Japanese were spraying had soaked important machinery like generators and pumps, further hampering efforts to restore the reactors’ electricity supply. The use of helicopters in the first week to drop water on the rectors from above was especially ineffective in hitting the target and may have done more harm than good, he said.

“They dumped water all over the place,” he said. “They keep on generating more contamination. That’s the consequence of doing it. They got water on things that shouldn’t be wet.”

Hiroto Sakashita, an associate professor in nuclear reactor thermal hydraulics at Hokkaido University, said that though the fuel rods in the nuclear reactors had already lost over 99 percent of their heat, they were still giving off enough heat to evaporate an estimated 200 tons of water a day.

And the remaining heat, from isotopes with long half-lives, will take years to cool. “They will just have to keep on pouring and pouring,” Mr. Sakashita said, “but contaminated water will keep leaking out.”

“Handling this situation is getting increasingly difficult,” he said.

Another hurdle workers face, of course, is to keep pumping enough water to cool the fuel rods, while at the same time trying to minimize the overflow of contaminated water. Tokyo Electric is also struggling to replace workers at the crippled plant, who must be cycled out as they approach a cumulative radiation exposure limit set by the Japanese government.

The company is leaning on its contractors to provide more workers, sometimes offering many times normal wages for the increasing risks of working at Fukushima, according to local news reports.

The risks that Japan could export its nuclear problems by allowing radioactive contaminants to get into the air and sea are among the reasons why the government and Tokyo Electric have enlisted the help of experts from France, the United States and elsewhere to make sure conditions do not spiral out of control.

On Tuesday, Peter B. Lyons, a senior United States nuclear energy official, said the Energy Department was preparing a shipment to Japan of radiation-hardened robots, and the personnel to demonstrate how to use them.

In an admission of how long the cooling process may take, Hidehiko Nishiyama, deputy director general of the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, Japan’s nuclear regulator, said late Tuesday: “We will have to continue cooling for quite a long period. We should be thinking years.”

Kuni Yogo, a former atomic energy policy planner in the Japan Science and Technology Agency, said: “There is some trial and error, but this is the beginning of a three- to five-year effort.”

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Lessons From Fukushima Taught on Capitol Hill

By MATTHEW L. WALD

WASHINGTON — Almost all American nuclear power plants have backup batteries that would last only half as long as those at Japan’s troubled Fukushima Daiichi plant did after a tsunami knocked out power there, an expert testified Tuesday at a Senate committee briefing on nuclear safety.

An industry official, addressing the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, conceded that battery life was “one of the obvious places” that nuclear operators would examine for potential improvements.

David Lochbaum, a nuclear expert at the Union of Concerned Scientists, which generally takes a critical tone toward nuclear reactors, said that just 11 of the nation’s 104 plants had eight-hour batteries, and 93 had four-hour batteries. The batteries are not powerful enough to run pumps that direct cooling water, but they can operate valves and can power instruments that give readings of water levels, flow and temperatures.

After the March 11 tsunami disabled the local electricity grid at the Fukushima Daiichi plant and the plant’s emergency diesel generators, the failure of the batteries deprived the plant’s operators of those crucial measurements.

Addressing the committee with Mr. Lochbaum was Anthony R. Pietrangelo, senior vice president and chief nuclear officer of the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry trade association. “To get to 48 hours, or 72 hours, pick a number,” he said of the backup batteries. “We’re going to have to take a hard look and see what resources would be required.”

After the committee briefing, Mr. Pietrangelo said that one alternative to adding long-lasting batteries could be having portable diesel generators available for quick dispatch to a reactor. Some equipment intended to cope with a severe accident or terrorist attack is already centrally stockpiled, he said.

Separately, Representative Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, said Tuesday that he would introduce legislation to require that American plants acquire 72-hour batteries along with 14 days of fuel for the backup diesel generators.

Fukushima reportedly had seven days of diesel fuel, but the tanks were washed away by the tsunami; most American plants bury their tanks for safety, according to industry officials.

The bill would also impose a moratorium on license renewals and on new plant licenses.

Another expert who spoke before the Senate committee, William Borchardt, the chief staff official of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said that the Fukushima crisis would have no impact on the commission’s granting of new licenses or license extensions.

If Japan’s experience shows that changes in reactors are needed here, he said, those will be ordered immediately, regardless of the status of the plant’s license, license extension or license application.

Another American practice that appears likely to be re-evaluated in view of Japan’s crisis is filling pools with spent fuel to the maximum extent possible. Mr. Markey and others called for reducing the risk by moving some fuel to dry casks, something that is done now only when the pool is at capacity.

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Publisher and/or Author and/or Managing Editor:__Andres Agostini ─ @Futuretronium at Twitter! Futuretronium Book at http://3.ly/rECc

Japan Nuclear Crisis Erodes Farmers’ Livelihoods

By MICHAEL WINES

TOWA, Japan — If Japan’s leaders regard the collapse of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex as this nation’s greatest crisis in decades, Saichi Sato has a different perspective. From where he sits in this leafy village of 8,000 about 25 miles from Daiichi, he says, this is the greatest crisis in 400 years.

Mr. Sato, 59, is a 17th-generation family farmer, a proprietor of 14 acres of greenhouses and fields where he grows rice, tomatoes, spinach and other vegetables. Or did grow: Last week, the national government banned the sale of farm products not just from Towa, but also from a stretch of north-central Japan extending south almost to Tokyo, for fear that they had been tainted with radiation.

Already, Mr. Sato stands to lose a fifth of his income because of the ban. If the government cannot contain the Daiichi disaster, he could lose a farm that his family has tended since the 1600s.

“Even if it’s not safe, I need my fields for my work,” he said. “I have no other place to go. I don’t even want to think about escaping from my land.”

Here and elsewhere in Fukushima Prefecture, the region hit hardest by the nuclear crisis, farmers are worried about their future — and convinced, like Mr. Sato, that the government is not on their side.

In interviews, several said they believed that leaders in Tokyo had mishandled the Daiichi disaster, sending conflicting signals on radiation dangers that fed panic among citizens. And they nurse a grievance, justified or otherwise, that in this moment of national peril the powers that be have thought first about Tokyo and only later about the hinterlands that are hurting the most.

And they are clearly hurting. Japan depends heavily on foreign suppliers for most food, but up to 80 percent of all vegetables are locally grown. Fukushima’s 70,000 commercial farmers produce more than $2.4 billion worth of spinach, tomatoes, milk and other popular foods a year.

The government’s ban on produce sales last week stopped that industry — and those in three adjacent prefectures to the south, Ibaraki, Tochigi and Gunma — in their tracks. Across the region, farmers are dumping millions of gallons of milk and tons of ripe vegetables into pits and streams, unable to sell their products legally on the open market.

“I can’t keep going for too long,” said Kenzo Sasaki, 70, who milks 18 cows on a farm outside the city of Fukushima, the local capital. Mr. Sasaki estimates that he is losing nearly $31,000 — not including the cost of feeding his herd — for every month that the sales ban continues.

Across town, Shoichi Abe, 62, milks about 30 cows in his own dingy barn. He has been unable to sell his 1,100 pounds of daily production since the March 11 earthquake damaged the milk-processing plant at the local farm co-op.

Now the government has extended that prohibition indefinitely.

Mr. Abe said, “It’s costing us 70,000 yen a day” — about $860.

“We have no income,” he said, “and the truth is that we don’t want to continue this. All the agriculture is gone. The consumers don’t want to buy products from Fukushima Prefecture, so we can’t sell them. It’s the rumor problem.”

To a person, the farmers say their products are safe to eat and drink. None of the growers interviewed had been visited by anyone seeking to monitor radiation on their land. The government’s radiation readings — to the extent that they have been publicized — have been ambiguous at best.

The government has ordered residents to leave a zone within 12 miles of the stricken Fukushima nuclear complex, while American regulators have suggested that people stay at least 50 miles away from the plant. Officials in the city of Fukushima, about 40 miles from the stricken reactor, have regularly posted analyses of radiation levels in drinking water — levels that approached official safety limits early on, but that have since dropped.

Outside the city, however, readings have been spotty, and some local residents feel overlooked. “They found radiation in the water in Tokyo, so they announced about Tokyo,” said Miyoko Abe, 57, the wife of a Fukushima diary farmer, referring to radiation reports that caused a run on bottled water in Tokyo last week. “But we know nothing about water north of Tokyo. The government is trying only to protect Tokyo.

“Maybe the prime minister is hiding in the nuclear shelter,” she said. “We don’t see him anywhere.”

More confusing to growers and consumers alike is the opaque official stance on what is safe and unsafe to buy and eat. The National Health Ministry, which had no limits on radiation in food, scrambled to set safety standards after the Fukushima crisis erupted. The new provisional rules, modeled on international criteria, generally deem a food unsafe if consuming it daily for one year would be likely to cause health problems.

Japanese officials began by banning the sales of only certain foods, including spinach and milk, which are especially prone to absorbing radiation. But the ban was later extended to a broad range of produce, even as officials stressed that the radiation level in any single product was not dangerous for anyone who consumed it at ordinary levels.

Farmers say the ambiguity has effectively shut down their sales. “We think we’ll lose 80 percent of our income,” Ryuji Togashi, who runs a Towa-area farmer’s co-op store, said last weekend. “We’ve been damaged by rumor. People think that all our vegetables are affected by radiation. We can’t even sell the products that aren’t affected.”

The central government has promised that farmers will be compensated for their losses, and Fukushima officials have urged growers to keep records documenting crops that are thrown away and milk that is dumped. But how farmers will be paid, and how much, remains in limbo.

The government has said that the Tokyo Electric Power Company, which runs the Fukushima reactors, may be held liable for farm losses, but the utility has yet to address the issue. Farmers say the government’s record on compensating them for losses from other problems like bird flu and mad cow disease does not inspire confidence.

“What the government offers is much less than what we expect,” said Mr. Sasaki, the dairy farmer. “It has always been like this. But this time, we’re on the edge.”

At least one farmer has been pushed over the edge. The newspaper The Asahi Shimbun reported recently that a 64-year-old farmer in Sukagawa, a city in Fukushima, killed himself one day after the government imposed a ban on the sale of cabbages from the prefecture.

The farmer, who was not identified, was reported to have lost his house in the earthquake but had a field of 7,500 organically grown cabbages ready for harvest when the prohibition was announced.

“Vegetables in Fukushima are finished,” his son quoted him as saying.

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Publisher and/or Author and/or Managing Editor:__Andres Agostini ─ @Futuretronium at Twitter! Futuretronium Book at http://3.ly/rECc

Amid Layoffs, City to Spend More on School Technology

By SHARON OTTERMAN

Despite sharp drops in state aid, New York City’s Department of Education plans to increase its technology spending, including $542 million next year alone that will primarily pay for wiring and other behind-the-wall upgrades to city schools.

The surge is part of an effort to move toward more online learning and computer-based standardized tests. But it comes just two years after the city declared a victory on the technology front, saying that every classroom in every school had had plug-in Internet connections and wireless access set up, an undertaking that cost roughly half a billion dollars over several years.

Some local officials are questioning the timing, since the city is also planning to cut $1.3 billion from its budget for new school construction over the next three years, and to eliminate 6,100 teaching positions, including 4,600 by layoffs.

While state law prevents capital funding, the source of much of the technology spending, from being used for salaries, both moves are likely to make class sizes rise.

“It is particularly large in the context of a fiscal crisis which the mayor reports is so dire that he may eliminate some 6,000 teaching positions,” Scott M. Stringer, the Manhattan borough president, wrote in a letter to the schools chancellor, Cathleen P. Black, last week.

Other critics have cited concerns about how the city has managed other high-price technology projects — notably CityTime, the automated payroll system that swelled to $700 million from $63 million, including what prosecutors called $80 million in false billing and kickbacks. The city comptroller, John C. Liu, announced audits last week of spending on online learning and of the Achievement Reporting and Innovation System, or ARIS, an $80 million school information database that cost more than projected and has been criticized for not living up to its promise of helping schools track student progress effectively.

“We’ve seen before how the city’s I.T. projects can run up exorbitant fees when they’re not properly monitored,” said H. Tina Kim, the city’s deputy comptroller for audits.

City education officials are not shy about their goal to more fully integrate computers into everyday instruction. Instead of a lonely desktop or two at the back of a room, officials picture entire classrooms of students going online simultaneously, taking Internet-based classes or assessments to measure both their and their teachers’ performance. This school year alone, the city has issued $50 million in contracts to build an online course-management system, called iLearn NYC, as well as to provide training and to pay companies like Rosetta Stone and Pearson Education to provide content.

The front line is called the Innovation Zone, or iZone, a group of 80 schools (out of the roughly 1,700 in the city) that are testing more intensive ways to use computers, like by having them design individualized lessons based on each student’s progress and weaknesses. Teachers would still be needed as guides, but the goal would be to try to solve the age-old problem of how to teach a group of students with a wide range of abilities. The plan is to expand the zone to 125 schools next year, and 400 schools by the end of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s third term.

“If we want our kids to be prepared for life after high school in the 21st century, we need to consider technology a basic element of public education,” said John White, a deputy chancellor at the Department of Education.

Despite the hundreds of millions of dollars already spent on wiring, city officials now say those connections are insufficient, given the need to stream high-definition video and interactive programs that they were not designed to handle. It is proposing to spend $465 million to upgrade those connections at 363 schools next year, and $315 million for additional schools by 2014, with schools chosen based on the state of their current technology infrastructure and the poverty level of their students.

Keeping pace is a problem around the country, as the need for bandwidth has increased exponentially, often amid a lack of planning and investment by governments because the field is so new, said Doug Levin, executive director of the State Educational Technology Directors Association.

“We have seen circumstances where schools have overbought for bandwidth they didn’t touch,” he said, “but increasingly we are seeing cases where districts thought that this was a problem that was solved, and they are now running into significant issues, and significant costs.”

The city says that even if it wanted to, it could not shift the money to help retain teachers, because it is part of the capital budget, which cannot be used for operating costs like salaries. The money can, however, be used for new school construction, which is being trimmed to $642 million from $2 billion over the next three years.

The capital budget will also include some money for classroom computers for the first time, though officials could not say how much. The cost of computers has traditionally come out of each school’s own budget or from outside grants, leading to wide discrepancies in the number of computers in different schools.

Yet it is sometimes unclear, from the city’s own financial reports, exactly how much it is spending on technology. The Gregorio Luperon High School for Science and Mathematics, in Washington Heights, for example, opened in 2008 in a new $41 million state-of-the-art building.

Two years later, it got its first connectivity upgrade, which the school construction capital plan said cost $405,000. Jou Zoquier, the school’s technology specialist, said the school received an upgrade from a T-1 connection, a fast broadband fiber-optic link, to a partial T-3 connection, which is even faster. But that change did not require any additional wiring, just a new signal sent from the Internet provider, Verizon. The only other change appeared to be the installation of high-speed wall connections in five rooms, including a conference room, a library and a computer lab.

When questioned, the city said that the $405,000 figure was from a budget projection that had incorrectly been made public, and that it had carried out only $37,000 in work there.

“We can always use more bandwidth,” Mr. Zoquier said, because the school has 300 computers for its 500 students. But as for the fiber-optic wall connections, he said, “usually we don’t use that unless setting up a lab, but it’s something we may be able to use in the future.”

At P.S. 97, a popular 800-student elementary school in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, the Internet has been running slowly because the school went from just three interactive white boards — popularly known as Smart boards — to 16 this year. It also has a computer lab and one computer per classroom. The slowness is despite the $247,000 connectivity upgrade that the city said the school received last year, which consisted mostly of improved wireless access points to broadcast signals through the building.

The principal, Kristine Mustillo, said she has applied for another upgrade, concerned that her connections will crawl next year when she adds 15 more Smart boards and 150 laptops, paid for by local grants. The city’s capital plan initially proposed $481,000 be spent in the school in 2010, then the city revised that number to $419,000 in pending work, and then it said the work had already been done at $247,000.

“I’ve been told we are pretty much at capacity,” Ms. Mustillo said. “How is it going to go when all our teachers are accessing the Internet along with 150 students at the same time?”

City officials said the most crucial reason for the new spending was to prepare for computerized standardized English and math tests being developed by a national consortium that may replace the existing state assessments in the 2014-15 school year. But the state Department of Education said last week that those exams, at least at first, would also be available in pencil-and-paper format to give districts time to make the transition. In response, the city said it wanted to be ahead of the curve, because the scoring of online tests would be faster and more accurate.

Already, some of the city’s larger ambitions for online instruction are taking longer than expected. Last week, officials said they would delay the expansion of a much-promoted experiment in educational technology, School of One, which uses iPod-like computer playlists to manage math lessons for each student at three middle schools. There were unanswered questions about the program’s effectiveness, the city said. In another setback, School of One’s founder, Joel Rose, quit the Department of Education last week to start a nonprofit organization that would seek to bring the program to other cities.

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As Regulators Weigh AT&T Bid, a Look at Wireless Markets Abroad

By JENNA WORTHAM and KEVIN J. O’BRIEN

For Americans, complaining about big cellphone bills that seem to only get bigger is standard practice. But they may actually be getting a pretty good deal — globally speaking.

While cellphone customers in the United States tend to pay more every month than consumers in other developed countries, they get more for their money in terms of voice and data use.

For example, Americans pay an average of 4 cents for a minute of talk time, while Canadians and the British pay more than twice that, according to recent data from Merrill Lynch and Bank of America. In Japan, where the top three wireless carriers control 97 percent of the market, locals pay 22 cents a minute.

“Pricing is what sets the U.S. apart from the rest of the world,” said Sam Paltridge, an analyst at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. “Americans spend less than average on communications.”

The question for regulators in Washington is how AT&T’s $39 billion bid to buy T-Mobile might change that. Analysts and industry experts worry that the deal could hurt consumers, in particular by eliminating T-Mobile’s low-cost phone plans. Some are urging regulators to block the acquisition, which would leave two major companies, AT&T and Verizon, with nearly 80 percent of the wireless market, followed by the much smaller Sprint. AT&T has said the merger will benefit consumers, in part by improving network quality and reach.

As they consider the deal, regulators may look abroad to see how competition affects wireless markets. With only three major network operators, the market in the United States would function similarly to some European markets, like France, which also has three operators, said J. Scott Marcus, the former chief technology officer at the telecommunications company GTE and former Internet policy adviser at the Federal Communications Commission.

“It will definitely become an oligopoly market,” Mr. Marcus said. “That will be less good than what one had before, but not awful.”

Of course, using other countries as a guide to how consolidation may play out is tricky, because every market is shaped by local cultural and business factors.

In Japan, for example, the average amount that consumers spend on data is the highest in the developed world — but not because of a lack of competition in the mobile industry. Japanese cellphone owners like to do a lot of browsing on their cellphones, and they are prepared to pay for that, said Steven Hartley, an analyst at Ovum, a research firm in London. Mr. Hartley said over 40 percent of mobile operators’ revenue in Japan comes from data services, compared with 25 percent in the United States.

Americans tend to talk nearly twice as much as people in most other developed countries, which led to the popularity of bigger buckets of voice minutes. And plans that offer nationwide calling with no roaming fees have also kept prices low. In Europe, which in theory is one market but is actually divided into many smaller national markets, roaming charges are a frequent and bothersome reality.

Europeans and Asians were quicker than Americans to embrace so-called prepaid phone service, in which customers do not have a contract and pay for chunks of voice minutes and data capacity as they go. This means phone owners are generally not tied to a single wireless company and have more flexibility to switch among services. Some even carry around multiple SIM cards, the fingernail-size chips that activate a cellphone for use, and decide which one to install based on which offers the cheapest rate for the country they are calling or visiting. For example, someone living in Spain who often visits family in France might purchase SIM cards for wireless services in both countries.

And phone customers outside the United States tend to have more handset choices, since cellphones are less likely to be “locked” for use with one particular carrier. But they have fewer opportunities to upgrade cheaply, because carriers are less likely to offer a free or discounted phone to those who commit to a one- or two-year contract.

Some of that is beginning to change, said Chris Jones, an analyst at Canalys. “Smartphones are beginning to get more popular in the U.K., so more people are buying smartphones and the contracts that come with them,” he said. Even so, those contracts can cost around £30 or £35 a month, or $48 to $56, and they do not include data, he said.

In general, the breadth of options in Europe has not yet led to significantly cheaper service, said Roger Entner, an analyst at Recon Analytics in Dedham, Mass. “It only drives down prices if competitors are willing to compete on price,” he said. “The market is more or less equally divided up, so there isn’t the same hypercompetitiveness that we have in the U.S.”

Heike Troue, the director of a public policy institute in Berlin, said that she was satisfied with the range of mobile choices available there. An iPhone 4 owner, she pays T-Mobile 90 euros a month, or $127, for her all-inclusive contract, which provides 1,000 calling minutes, three gigabytes of data transfers and 1,500 text messages. Since she signed up for the plan last November, she has never hit those limits. “One can only talk so much,” Ms. Troue said.

At times, high costs abroad have prompted lawmakers and regulators to step in. European and British telecom companies are bowing to such pressure by lowering or planning to lower termination fees — the fees that the caller’s carrier must pay to the recipient’s carrier. The goal is to give carriers more flexibility to compete by selling more generous packages with larger chunks of talk time, text allotments and cheaper data services.

European regulators have also ordered that limits be placed on roaming charges for calling and texting, and are working on a similar limit on data roaming charges.

In South Korea, the government has put pressure on the three major carriers — SK Telecom, KT and LG Telecom — to cut rates on text messages and calls, and it also limits the amount of subsidies the companies can offer on new phones.

Regulators in the United States could require AT&T to make some concessions for the T-Mobile deal to be approved, like giving up wireless spectrum in some cities. The review by the Justice Department and the F.C.C. could take several months, and analysts say it could be a year before the full effect of the deal is clear. Some analysts say that the combined company might actually lower prices to better compete with Verizon. But others warn of side effects.

Mr. Paltridge of the O.E.C.D said that the overall consequence of combining AT&T and T-Mobile might be broader than most consumers think. For example, it would leave only one American carrier using GSM, the world’s most common cellular standard. That means AT&T could raise rates for Americans using their phones overseas and for foreigners visiting the United States.

“If the two merged, there would be an international angle to the competition issue,” he said.

Source and/or read more: http://goo.gl/Jeu2P

Publisher and/or Author and/or Managing Editor:__Andres Agostini ─ @Futuretronium at Twitter! Futuretronium Book at http://3.ly/rECc

MARCH 29, 2011, 12:42 AM

Amazon Introduces a Digital Music Locker

By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER

Amazon.com plans to introduce a service that will let people upload their digital music to the Web and access it from browsers on any computer and from Android phones.

The service, known as a music locker, was made available to Amazon account holders early Tuesday. Amazon will offer a Web-based hard drive backup service called Cloud Drive, where people can store documents, photos, videos and music.

It will also offer Cloud Player, which will let people listen to, download and make playlists from the music they store on Cloud Drive from any Web browser or from an app on Android devices. Cloud Player will automatically upload songs bought on Amazon and scan iTunes or Windows libraries to find other music to upload.

Amazon is racing Google and Apple, both of which are interested in offering similar services. One key difference is that Google and Apple reportedly want to automatically make all the music that a user owns available to stream on other devices, while Amazon will require that people upload music, except songs they buy on Amazon, to access it elsewhere.

The dream of these companies, along with many start-ups, is for people to be able to listen to their music from any computer or phone. But they have all run into the same problem: music labels and publishers would prefer that listeners buy a new copy of a song everywhere they want to listen to it.

Several experts in digital music say that the music locker business is still legally ambiguous. For example, though some companies let people upload their music and listen to it elsewhere without any outcry from the labels, others, like MP3tunes, have been sued by music labels. Another issue: it is impossible for Web companies to tell whether a song was bought legally or downloaded illegally.

Amazon says it has sidestepped the problem, because its users would upload their songs, in MP3 or A.A.C. format, to the cloud-based service, just like backing them up on an external hard drive or a Web-based computer backup service.

“We don’t need a license to store music,” said Craig Pape, director of music at Amazon. “The functionality is the same as an external hard drive.”

Companies including Google and Spotify have been forced to delay introducing certain services while they negotiate with the music labels and publishers.

Several executives at major labels expressed concern about such a service from Amazon and whether it would violate the terms of their current licensing agreements with the company. They agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity because their agreements with Amazon are confidential.

Amazon is offering five gigabytes of free storage and 20 gigabytes free if a customer buys an album from Amazon.

Source and/or read more: http://goo.gl/LqLIL

Publisher and/or Author and/or Managing Editor:__Andres Agostini ─ @Futuretronium at Twitter! Futuretronium Book at http://3.ly/rECc