I was glad to see Rob Atkinson at ITIF highlight the relationship between our declining role in worldwide manufacturing and our education system in his post Creating the Manufacturing University. While lethargic jobs growth and loss of manufacturing overseas will always attract attention, they belie a seemingly great paradox: there are, today, over a half million open, US manufacturing jobs that companies can’t find qualified workers to fill. But when you read stories with quotes from hiring managers, its not such a mystery: there’s a big gap between the potential workers our education system is producing and the requirements of today’s US manufacturers.

Were you outraged at the Department of Energy over the long-term lack of electricity to millions of Americans following hurricane Sandy? Are you waiting for Secretary Chu’s explanation of why 40% of the 2012 corn crop is going to ethanol, raising food prices during an economic slump? Do you follow DOE’s positions on the Keystone XL pipeline or the renewal of the Wind Production Tax Credit? I can confidently say the answer is ‘No’, since no one I know believes the DOE plays a serious role in US energy strategy and execution.

We got our daughter a Kindle Fire HD for her 12th birthday. So far its a fantastic fit for her needs: enough available games to keep her happy, access to Netflix and her videos and music. The latter two are a little clumsy (certainly not iTunes-caliber), but so far the differences don’t seem like a big deal to her. At the end of the day you always end up manually ending space on these devices, and iTunes doesn’t help that process much.

This week Roger Pielke Sr. retired his weblog. I just wanted to thank him for the effort he had put into it. I suspect he informed and influenced far more people than he knows. I’ve done professional work in both sustainability and energy, and have been personally compelled to stay on top of climate science. Having a career of experience with data, complex systems and computer models, it’s been obvious to me for awhile that a) the climate is a very complex system, and we don’t fully understand it, b) the data we have about our climate covers a very small window of time, and while the quality of our data continues to improve, simple questions like “what’s the average temperature” are non-trivial and prone to unexpectedly high error bars, and c) predicting the climate future relies on very complex computer models, that have not yet shown that we should trust all of their output.

Over at Huffington Post my friend Bernard David asks an important question: As we rebuild after Sandy, what are we going to do different than before? Are we going to just rebuild what was there previously, or consciously decide to make changes that will reduce the impact of future natural disasters? While the debate will continue about the degree to which Sandy was or wasn’t influenced by human-induced climate change, for the purpose of this discussion I join Roger Pielke, Jr and others in arguing that it doesn’t matter.

One question I often get is why companies don’t make efficiency update to their datacenters more regularly. Part of the answer is the complexity and associated fear of modifying an operating IT infrastructure, which is especially challenging in 24x7 environments. However, there’s another set of issues. Here’s a typical scenario: A company buys energy efficient capital equipment now, which has a certain tax/accounting treatment The resulting savings come down the road in the form of reduced operating expenses, which have a different tax/accounting treatment There are three natural problems with this inside companies:

Knowing my longstanding interest in computing and sustainability, a number of people sent me the NYT article, Power, Pollution and the Internet on the inefficiencies of data centers (or as the link to the article says, “data-centers-waste-vast-amounts-of-energy-belying-industry-image.html”). Here are my thoughts on some of the points raised by the article, and a closing thought on the messenger itself. Do data centers use lots of energy? Absolutely. The number in the article says that data centers sustain around 30 billion watts, which I won’t argue with.

In the midst of a trend to credit the federal government with all of the great things that have been invented or built since WW II, it is important that we study the history and the lessons it has to offer. The WSJ has a useful op-ed about the start of the Internet that untangles some of innovation myths of the oft-cited endeavor. Government Successes in Innovation I give the US government massive credit for their role in fundamental research.

I often see resumes in my job, or look them over for friends. Here’s my general advice. Of course this is all my opinion (especially about style of a resume), and I’m sure there are other valid approaches out there. The shorter the better * look at every word and phrase and see if it is adding anything to the story * if an item was covered in a more recent job, leave it out unless it has a unique point to make Be results-oriented.

I recently read Land of Promise, a book by Michael Lind on the economic history of the US. The book is currently being discussed in Breakthrough Institute circles and was reviewed by the NYT last week. Land of Promise provides an anecdotal history of the American economy, framed by the competing philosophies of Hamilton (large organizations with direct government collaboration) and Jefferson (small, independent organizations with limited government involvement). Organized as short anecdotes representing key points in time, the book provides an overall sense of US economic evolution against the backdrop of historic events.