Training Commuters is Difficult

California Bay Area train system Caltrain has received approval from the Federal Railroad Administration to run electric locomotives on the same tracks as their current diesel stock. Apparently this is the first time such approval has been given to any system in the United States. The business case to save the struggling Caltrain was the decisive argument, according to Robert Doty, director of the Peninsula Rail Program which championed the move.

Doty suggested that this result moves the state closer to running high-speed trains on the same tracks:

The same equipment standards that we have qualified for, the equipment we're looking for, are the same equipment standards for high speed rail. So in effect what we've done is we found the process that needs to be followed and we've done it successfully. Now, they can take our process and expand it for high speed rail, so it is absolutely a precursor for high speed rail.

Well, that's a bit like saying that building a Volkswagon Bug paves the way to building a Porsche Carrera.

The ARPA-E Pipeline and the Three Sputniks

Arun Majumdar, Director of ARPA-E, spoke to about 150 people in the atrium of the Paul Allen Computer Science & Engineering Building at the University of Washington on Thursday. Dr. Majumdar provided a detailed explanation of the role of his agency in building a technology "pipeline" connecting the creators of new solutions to the integrators searching for solutions to the "three Sputniks" of energy security, green house gas (GHG) emissions, and US global technological leadership. He sees these as all connected, composing three axes of the same 3-D reality. We must stop importing 60% of our oil from "places hostile to us" and then burning it, exacerbating damage from climate change. Finding other ways to create the energy we need that are clean and renewable will also power US innovation, economic prosperity, and global leadership. Tackling these Three Sputniks is the Congressional directive to ARPA-E.

Worth at Least a Thousand Words

If you like graphical presentations of data you need to take a look at Gapminder. Some beautiful and fascinating interactive graphs. Spend some time with the visual display; there are a lot of controls allowing customizable views, speed, ability to highlight particular countries/regions, etc. Find the small arrows on each axis and the bubble size legend to select any 3 sets of data to correlate over time. Change axes between linear/logarithmic to better separate the data points.

Here's an interesting chart correlating total CO2 emissions, emissions per person and total population by country. Notice how little the change in emissions is from increases per person rather than population growth. Also, check out the paths of China and India. Here's with the data correlated to total energy consumption instead of population. Watch China's acceleration of the past few years. Great stuff.

UPDATE:  To get an idea of some of the things this tool can do, check out this presentation:

You've never seen data presented like this. With the drama and urgency of a sportscaster, statistics guru Hans Rosling debunks myths about the so-called "developing world."