There's a bit more fundamental problem here: reducing the rate of metastasis won't really save the lives of people with 6 weeks to live. This type of drug (if it works at all in humans) would need to be administered immediately after diagnosis to prevent metastasis, once the tumor has already metastasized into a critical organ and is growing large enough to be life-threatening its rather useless. This also complicates testing since you'll need to track patients on the drug over the course of their entire cancer treatment, show that it was the drug and not the treatment that prevented metastasis and also prove that it was the drug and not random happenstance, the particular sub-variant of cancer the patient has and/or the patient's own unique immune system that prevented metastasis. Not is it very difficult to prove something like this works, but side-effects become incredibly critical for the trial (for a patient with 5-10 years to live, can you justify drastically reducing quality of life for that period?). A lot of cancer mortality also doesn't necessarily come from metastasis, but from side effects of treatment (radiotherapy and some small molecule kinase inhibitors increase susceptibility to / cause new cancers) and from the original tumor. For a drug such as this, the best route for both the pharma company and the general public is to move slowly and double check everything to make sure its safe (a lot of things that kill some cancers make others worse...) and that it works as advertised.
I'd like to add that foresight also does include consideration of the risk of mass slaughter of innocents and taking every reasonable step to minimize that risk. Sometimes it takes a little hindsight to realize that this should also be a necessary component of planning military action in a region where the majority of residents are civilians. Regardless of the righteousness of the endeavor, it's a very difficult balance to strike between protecting the lives of innocents and protecting the lives of our troops. Analyzing events like this in hindsight allow us to pinpoint where things went wrong and how we might best prevent them from going wrong in the future without compromising the safety of our troops.
As a matter of opinion regarding your last point, though, if we'd rather slaughter innocents than risk the safety of our troops how can what we're doing be the right thing? why are our troops even there? As I understand it, there are two stated goals in continuing to be involved in Iraq: securing the safety and freedom of the Iraqi people and securing the safety and freedom of the American people. I believe that both are necessarily intertwined and slaughtering the very people we don't want to become anti-Americans and terrorists is counter-productive even if you do not consider the ethical and moral ramifications of any military action and only consider American interests in the matter.
Re:To sum it up:
on
iPad Review
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Plus it seems the market has pretty much settled on the 10" format for netbooks which allows for near-normal sized keyboards. 4 post-docs in my lab and the PI have netbooks as their primary computer, another lab I've worked with had every lab machine replaced with 10" netbooks and a set of external monitors scattered around. They're cheap, powerful enough, fairly durable and completely usable.
Its actually kind of true, but for the wrong reason. One of the leading causes of death in AIDS patients is chronic viral hepatitis which destroys the liver. About 80% of cases of liver failure in AIDS patients can be directly attributable to viral hepatitis, although liver disease only accounts for 14% of the total mortality in AIDS patients. Even death due to cardiovascular disease (9% of total mortality in HIV+ patients) have been seen to correlate significantly with CD4+ T-cell count. That's not to say that there is no ART toxicity, but it still improves the survivability of the infection and increases the life expectancy of patients.
That being said, I'm pretty sure you're not going to be able to convince the/.er that feels that all "mainstream" scientists are hacks. Kind of amused he got modded interesting...
It should be clarified that what PARC is announcing is a small flow cytometer used to count T-cells that express the CD4 antigen, a particular subset of T-cells that is most affected by HIV. A dropping concentration of these cells in HIV+ patients' blood is a reasonable metric for the progression of AIDS. It should also be noted that the system PARC demonstrated is not a full-fledged CD4+ T-cell counter, because you also need to measure CD3 expression to tell apart CD4+ T-cells and other white cells that express CD4, like monocytes. Traditional flow cytometers do this by using two antibodies (CD3 and CD4) labelled with different colored fluorescent dyes and measuring the intensity of each color channel using a photomultiplier tube or avalanche photodiode (these are very weak signals!). The PARC prototype is a proof-of-concept that only measures CD4 expression so would very often overestimate the true concentration of CD4+ T-cells in blood.
The interesting thing here is that they've apparently been able to do away with PMTs and APDs as detectors using a method called spatially modulated fluorescence emission. Typically a very narrowly focused laser beam (a few microns or thinner) is used to excite the fluorescent label, so you get precious few photons out of it to detect (hence the need for high-gain detectors like PMTs and APDs). The idea here is to stretch out the excitation region and use a slit pattern to help in background subtraction since you can predict the locations (in time) of the fluorescence signal as it passes by the slits allowing for integration of that signal over a longer period of time with lower background than you would otherwise be able to with a standard photodiode. This also lets you mitigate the loss of bandwidth you'd get by stretching out your detection region since you can figure out which tiny spikes in signal from the photodiode go together based on the known pattern of spacings in the slit and the timings of the peaks.
Very clever! Definitely a lot more interesting than all the cytometer-on-chip microfluidics stuff that's been thrown around since the 80's to no notable success.
Shameful cost, though. $14 billion for 2 1154MW reactors is pathetic compared to some international projects. India is installing two Russian VVER1000 reactors (1000MW) listed as 95% and 85% complete for $3.5b (little chance of additional cost overruns in the 10.5 billion dollar range at this point) and an additional 4 VVER1200s for $1,200 / kW of installed capacity. By comparison, Southern will be paying over $6,000 / kW of capacity.
Not disagreeing with the sentiment of your post, but its really sad that 6 years now qualifies as long-term vision. One would hope that governments would always plan for the future, but I guess its one consequence of the evolving nature of democracy / republics that governments no longer seem to be often able to look past current politicians' terms in office.
Especially since a lot of scientists in these programs tend to come from disadvantaged backgrounds. As much flak as the reservation systems get from middle class Indians (essentially a quota-based affirmative action program) its been phenomenally successful at catapulting at least moderately gifted individuals from impoverished backgrounds (the primary criticism leveled against reservations has been that those students are typically admitted with significantly lower than average test scores) into cutting edge scientific research and high technology industries.
Especially small to medium sized local ones, they're always looking for all the help they can get since they can't afford to hire out services on a regular basis. They're usually also the ones that are best connected into the community and are more concerned with quality than scale. Its a good idea to look into groups that are used to international volunteers as well, just to make life easier. An example of this type of organization would be Manav Sadhna in India, which operates out of the Gandhi Ashram in Gujarat.
The patent application was filed on June 30th 2008. Google released Latitude February 4th, 2009. This would seem to indicate Apple was first, but there's a key difference between the products. The Apple patent specifically deals with sharing location information by text message and only by text message, Google Latitude makes use of mobile internet connections. There's no patent dispute here, merely Apple acting like Apple and rejecting apps which may compete with current or planned functionality that Apple wants to deliver over their platform.
I am by no means a big fan of Apple or Apple products in general, but for those screaming "anti-trust" Apple is entirely within their right to do this (although whether its the "right" thing to do is questionable) considering A) Apple has nothing near a monopoly over the smartphone market B) A monopoly over one's own product is hardly a monopoly and C) Even if Apple were able to completely supplant Google Latitude among iPhone users, they're not going to be selling their software on the other 90% of smartphones out there anytime soon.
Amazon reports that Kindle owners buy, on average, 3.1 times as many books on the site as other customers
Not to mention that we've already discussed how Amazon sold more e-books over Christmas than it did physical books. Piracy is killing the publishing industry like its killing the movie industry.
It seems that netbooks in the 7-9" range have started to disappear, instead they've grown slightly (both in size and specs) to essentially have become 10" cheap laptops. I know many people that use them as machines to take while traveling (especially internationally) and even more people that use them as their primary portable (typically with a larger laptop or desktop relegated to, well, the desk). $300 for a small, durable laptop with more than enough performance to do word-processing, web browsing and watch movies on, most which get 5+ hours of battery life (depending on usage) is still an amazing deal.
A good indication of their continuing success is the fact that 10" netbooks still account for 4 out of 5 of the top sellers in the computers and accessories categories on Amazon.
Full electric scooters have been available in India for a couple years, actually. They've not become widespread for the same reason that electric vehicles haven't in the US. Too expensive, not enough range.
The biotechnology is at least quite believable
on
The Science of Avatar
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· Score: 1
Even if their neural interfaces are a bit out there. We've been growing humanized mice for years. I wonder if all they really needed to do, however, was to generate a chimera by seeding an embryo with a human nervous system before the immune system starts to develop. We've learned quiteabit about developmental biology from avian chimeras, mammalian chimeras are a bit more challenging but can be achieved.
Its been well known for a while that financial motivation for creative work does not result in increased productivity or quality of work. Trying to incentivize coders to be more productive is often counterproductive since they'll be motivated to just hammer out something that works rather than spending a few moments actually thinking about the problem and coming up with an efficient solution that will be better for the codebase in the long run. Trying to reward individual coders based on some arbitrary measure of productivity will never properly reward the right coder nor produce the highest quality of code possible. Using subjective judgement by technical peers rather than objective measures cooked up by HR, providing comfortable and respectful working conditions and encouraging the exploration of the intellectual and creative sides of coding are probably some of the best steps one can take to help good coders produce great code. If you provide the right environment, you have a good chance of attracting a lot of great talent even if you don't offer the best pay in the market because having a job where you're intellectually challenged and your expertise is valued (and listened to!) can be worth a lot more to a good programmer than an extra few grand a year.
Wow, it really sounds like your community should just revolt and publish exclusively in PLoS. If enough high-profile researchers can be convinced of the value of it, there won't be a stigma regarding recognition. The problem is convincing them of the value in switching.
Indeed, privacy concerns are an interesting straw man here. The fact of the matter is that pretty much nothing on the internet is truly private. Even if Bing has a better written privacy policy it doesn't really follow that they'll actually be more respectful of their customers privacy than Google. If you have sensitive information that you don't want a 3rd party to have access to on the internet, then don't put it on the internet- the very act of doing that means the information won't be private anymore. 99.9999% of users don't care if Google knows they enjoy watching the Wire or what words people didn't know because they searched for its wiki page or what journal articles I look up on Scholar or what companies I've recently read about and decided to look up on finance. In fact most of the people I know that use Google services heavily are more than happy to share that kind of irrelevant information if Google sees some value in it and can use revenue indirectly generated from that to provide us with amazing products like Reader, Groups, Gmail, Android, Code, Scholar, Finance, Books, etc etc etc. In conclusion, information on the internet is not going to private regardless of whose search engine you use or how kitten-friendly their privacy policy is. At least Google has a decent track record of being respectful about your 'private' data while working towards as close to an ideal privacy scenario as it would be possible to get online.
I honestly think you might be pleasantly surprised with Lovin's talk then. If I understood your complaint correctly, this is exactly what he does- walk through a step-by-step solution to the problem of oil dependency. Lovins focuses first on the economics of efficiency, goes through a few proposals on how to improve light vehicle efficiency as an example (including a fully designed and manufacturable high-efficiency cross-over SUV and the advantages of such designs) as well as efficiency in trucking and air travel, following which he goes through a quantitative assessment of the cost of purchasing efficiency, several manners in which foreign oil consumption could be completely eliminated by 2040 (through various mixes of purchasing efficiency and creating alternatives through hydrogen and biofuel) and proposes a few relatively lightweight government programs that could hasten this process.
I do support nuclear, very strongly in fact. The way its being done in the US currently is retarded however. American utilities have taken a very short-term view on project pay-back and cite $7,500 + per-kW prices on new reactors and outlandish per-kWh costs to customers (Lovins has a piece denouncing nuclear because of this, but he doesn't take into consideration that its been done much cheaper elsewhere). Compare that to new reactors being built in India of both Indian and Russian design and its almost shameful. Two Russian 1MW reactors are going up in southern India at a total project cost of around $4 Billion. This is extremely competitive with other alternative energy sources and has the advantage of reliable, predictable and clean power output. By comparison a recent proposal for a 2.7MW plant near Houston reached something to the tune of a $17 Billion initial costing with the manufacturer refusing to commit to any price leaving the door open for massive cost overruns. The NCPIL (Nuclear power corporation of India Limited) by contrast has done amazing work in bringing new nuclear power stations ranging from 220 MW to 2GW online while being very profitable and maintaining forward-thinking policies on nuclear waste recycling through the construction of fast breeder reactors to produce and burn plutonium.
Regardless of whether you think Paul Krugman is a silly radical leftist or if you don't believe humans can or are causing dangerous shifts in climate, it doesn't change the fact that its in the best interest of public health, national security and the American economy to invest in efficiency and next-generation energy sources. We can eliminate our dependency on foreign oil, reduce the level of particulate pollution and environmental damage caused by burning fossil fuels and mining coal and create millions of jobs while making gobs and bogs of money doing it. I see nothing silly or leftist about that. American companies are already pursuing this on their own. Lovins, Krugman and others on both sides of the political spectrum advocate government policies to encourage this although obviously the left-leaning players advocate larger and more direct government involvement. In the end, Federally sponsored research and development through the DOE, NSF, DARPA and ARPA will typically be focused on 20-30 year down-the-road technology while SBIRs and feebates will encourage short term changes in consumer and business behavior toward efficiency and hasten the commercialization of technologies that are 5-10 years away from market. I think all of these elements can contribute in big ways towards all of the goals mentioned earlier but I don't think the loss of any of them on idealogical grounds will seriously hinder the march towards green industry already progress, only perhaps slow it down. The disagreements over the human causes of climate change are really more of an annoying hindrance to getting legislation passed on this that could be huge for the environment, the economy and American competitiveness than a real debate. I think people that argue against a lot of the legislation tied to reducing carbon emissions on the grounds that climate change isn't real are missing the point. A big part of this seems to be an obsessive distrust of anything that's been labeled as a liberal agenda even though many of these policies will drive tremendous economic growth and prosperity.
I'm sure none of his accomplishments or extensive experience as an economist or his proven track record of being "ideologically colorblind" have anything to do with the fact that his ideas on what investment in sustainable energy and efficiency should perhaps be listened to by the general public. Besides, as Amory Lovins says in his TED talk, one could conceivably add almost every major tech company in America let alone the world to the list of organizations recognizing that investment in efficiency has green results in more ways than one. The Nobel Prize in Economics, like the science Prizes, is also significantly more impressive than the Peace Prizes which Gore and Obama won. There are a number of other economists that advocate aggressive investment in efficiency and sustainable energy as one of the surest bets America has to reassert its economic dominance over the world as the BRIC countries continue to grow their economies and political muster in the world, Krugman is simply one of the more widely known and read of these.
Slashdot Mirror
Wouldn't a large impact just melt/fuse the underlying rock and destroy any evidence of interesting geological, hydrological or biological features?
There's a bit more fundamental problem here: reducing the rate of metastasis won't really save the lives of people with 6 weeks to live. This type of drug (if it works at all in humans) would need to be administered immediately after diagnosis to prevent metastasis, once the tumor has already metastasized into a critical organ and is growing large enough to be life-threatening its rather useless. This also complicates testing since you'll need to track patients on the drug over the course of their entire cancer treatment, show that it was the drug and not the treatment that prevented metastasis and also prove that it was the drug and not random happenstance, the particular sub-variant of cancer the patient has and/or the patient's own unique immune system that prevented metastasis. Not is it very difficult to prove something like this works, but side-effects become incredibly critical for the trial (for a patient with 5-10 years to live, can you justify drastically reducing quality of life for that period?). A lot of cancer mortality also doesn't necessarily come from metastasis, but from side effects of treatment (radiotherapy and some small molecule kinase inhibitors increase susceptibility to / cause new cancers) and from the original tumor. For a drug such as this, the best route for both the pharma company and the general public is to move slowly and double check everything to make sure its safe (a lot of things that kill some cancers make others worse...) and that it works as advertised.
I'd like to add that foresight also does include consideration of the risk of mass slaughter of innocents and taking every reasonable step to minimize that risk. Sometimes it takes a little hindsight to realize that this should also be a necessary component of planning military action in a region where the majority of residents are civilians. Regardless of the righteousness of the endeavor, it's a very difficult balance to strike between protecting the lives of innocents and protecting the lives of our troops. Analyzing events like this in hindsight allow us to pinpoint where things went wrong and how we might best prevent them from going wrong in the future without compromising the safety of our troops.
As a matter of opinion regarding your last point, though, if we'd rather slaughter innocents than risk the safety of our troops how can what we're doing be the right thing? why are our troops even there? As I understand it, there are two stated goals in continuing to be involved in Iraq: securing the safety and freedom of the Iraqi people and securing the safety and freedom of the American people. I believe that both are necessarily intertwined and slaughtering the very people we don't want to become anti-Americans and terrorists is counter-productive even if you do not consider the ethical and moral ramifications of any military action and only consider American interests in the matter.
Plus it seems the market has pretty much settled on the 10" format for netbooks which allows for near-normal sized keyboards. 4 post-docs in my lab and the PI have netbooks as their primary computer, another lab I've worked with had every lab machine replaced with 10" netbooks and a set of external monitors scattered around. They're cheap, powerful enough, fairly durable and completely usable.
Its actually kind of true, but for the wrong reason. One of the leading causes of death in AIDS patients is chronic viral hepatitis which destroys the liver. About 80% of cases of liver failure in AIDS patients can be directly attributable to viral hepatitis, although liver disease only accounts for 14% of the total mortality in AIDS patients. Even death due to cardiovascular disease (9% of total mortality in HIV+ patients) have been seen to correlate significantly with CD4+ T-cell count. That's not to say that there is no ART toxicity, but it still improves the survivability of the infection and increases the life expectancy of patients.
/.er that feels that all "mainstream" scientists are hacks. Kind of amused he got modded interesting...
That being said, I'm pretty sure you're not going to be able to convince the
It should be clarified that what PARC is announcing is a small flow cytometer used to count T-cells that express the CD4 antigen, a particular subset of T-cells that is most affected by HIV. A dropping concentration of these cells in HIV+ patients' blood is a reasonable metric for the progression of AIDS. It should also be noted that the system PARC demonstrated is not a full-fledged CD4+ T-cell counter, because you also need to measure CD3 expression to tell apart CD4+ T-cells and other white cells that express CD4, like monocytes. Traditional flow cytometers do this by using two antibodies (CD3 and CD4) labelled with different colored fluorescent dyes and measuring the intensity of each color channel using a photomultiplier tube or avalanche photodiode (these are very weak signals!). The PARC prototype is a proof-of-concept that only measures CD4 expression so would very often overestimate the true concentration of CD4+ T-cells in blood.
The interesting thing here is that they've apparently been able to do away with PMTs and APDs as detectors using a method called spatially modulated fluorescence emission. Typically a very narrowly focused laser beam (a few microns or thinner) is used to excite the fluorescent label, so you get precious few photons out of it to detect (hence the need for high-gain detectors like PMTs and APDs). The idea here is to stretch out the excitation region and use a slit pattern to help in background subtraction since you can predict the locations (in time) of the fluorescence signal as it passes by the slits allowing for integration of that signal over a longer period of time with lower background than you would otherwise be able to with a standard photodiode. This also lets you mitigate the loss of bandwidth you'd get by stretching out your detection region since you can figure out which tiny spikes in signal from the photodiode go together based on the known pattern of spacings in the slit and the timings of the peaks.
Very clever! Definitely a lot more interesting than all the cytometer-on-chip microfluidics stuff that's been thrown around since the 80's to no notable success.
Shameful cost, though. $14 billion for 2 1154MW reactors is pathetic compared to some international projects. India is installing two Russian VVER1000 reactors (1000MW) listed as 95% and 85% complete for $3.5b (little chance of additional cost overruns in the 10.5 billion dollar range at this point) and an additional 4 VVER1200s for $1,200 / kW of installed capacity. By comparison, Southern will be paying over $6,000 / kW of capacity.
Not disagreeing with the sentiment of your post, but its really sad that 6 years now qualifies as long-term vision. One would hope that governments would always plan for the future, but I guess its one consequence of the evolving nature of democracy / republics that governments no longer seem to be often able to look past current politicians' terms in office.
Especially since a lot of scientists in these programs tend to come from disadvantaged backgrounds. As much flak as the reservation systems get from middle class Indians (essentially a quota-based affirmative action program) its been phenomenally successful at catapulting at least moderately gifted individuals from impoverished backgrounds (the primary criticism leveled against reservations has been that those students are typically admitted with significantly lower than average test scores) into cutting edge scientific research and high technology industries.
Especially small to medium sized local ones, they're always looking for all the help they can get since they can't afford to hire out services on a regular basis. They're usually also the ones that are best connected into the community and are more concerned with quality than scale. Its a good idea to look into groups that are used to international volunteers as well, just to make life easier. An example of this type of organization would be Manav Sadhna in India, which operates out of the Gandhi Ashram in Gujarat.
With lots of experience both within and without, what other words of wisdom can be offered to those wishing to break into a mega-corp?
Black clothes, a ski mask and quiet footwear would probably help.
The patent application was filed on June 30th 2008. Google released Latitude February 4th, 2009. This would seem to indicate Apple was first, but there's a key difference between the products. The Apple patent specifically deals with sharing location information by text message and only by text message, Google Latitude makes use of mobile internet connections. There's no patent dispute here, merely Apple acting like Apple and rejecting apps which may compete with current or planned functionality that Apple wants to deliver over their platform.
I am by no means a big fan of Apple or Apple products in general, but for those screaming "anti-trust" Apple is entirely within their right to do this (although whether its the "right" thing to do is questionable) considering A) Apple has nothing near a monopoly over the smartphone market B) A monopoly over one's own product is hardly a monopoly and C) Even if Apple were able to completely supplant Google Latitude among iPhone users, they're not going to be selling their software on the other 90% of smartphones out there anytime soon.
Amazon reports that Kindle owners buy, on average, 3.1 times as many books on the site as other customers
Not to mention that we've already discussed how Amazon sold more e-books over Christmas than it did physical books. Piracy is killing the publishing industry like its killing the movie industry.
It seems that netbooks in the 7-9" range have started to disappear, instead they've grown slightly (both in size and specs) to essentially have become 10" cheap laptops. I know many people that use them as machines to take while traveling (especially internationally) and even more people that use them as their primary portable (typically with a larger laptop or desktop relegated to, well, the desk). $300 for a small, durable laptop with more than enough performance to do word-processing, web browsing and watch movies on, most which get 5+ hours of battery life (depending on usage) is still an amazing deal.
A good indication of their continuing success is the fact that 10" netbooks still account for 4 out of 5 of the top sellers in the computers and accessories categories on Amazon.
Full electric scooters have been available in India for a couple years, actually. They've not become widespread for the same reason that electric vehicles haven't in the US. Too expensive, not enough range.
Even if their neural interfaces are a bit out there. We've been growing humanized mice for years. I wonder if all they really needed to do, however, was to generate a chimera by seeding an embryo with a human nervous system before the immune system starts to develop. We've learned quite a bit about developmental biology from avian chimeras, mammalian chimeras are a bit more challenging but can be achieved.
Merriam-Webster would disagree.
Its been well known for a while that financial motivation for creative work does not result in increased productivity or quality of work. Trying to incentivize coders to be more productive is often counterproductive since they'll be motivated to just hammer out something that works rather than spending a few moments actually thinking about the problem and coming up with an efficient solution that will be better for the codebase in the long run. Trying to reward individual coders based on some arbitrary measure of productivity will never properly reward the right coder nor produce the highest quality of code possible. Using subjective judgement by technical peers rather than objective measures cooked up by HR, providing comfortable and respectful working conditions and encouraging the exploration of the intellectual and creative sides of coding are probably some of the best steps one can take to help good coders produce great code. If you provide the right environment, you have a good chance of attracting a lot of great talent even if you don't offer the best pay in the market because having a job where you're intellectually challenged and your expertise is valued (and listened to!) can be worth a lot more to a good programmer than an extra few grand a year.
Wow, it really sounds like your community should just revolt and publish exclusively in PLoS. If enough high-profile researchers can be convinced of the value of it, there won't be a stigma regarding recognition. The problem is convincing them of the value in switching.
Or a classic example of patents being used by Nokia to get cheap licensing to Apple IP
Indeed, privacy concerns are an interesting straw man here. The fact of the matter is that pretty much nothing on the internet is truly private. Even if Bing has a better written privacy policy it doesn't really follow that they'll actually be more respectful of their customers privacy than Google. If you have sensitive information that you don't want a 3rd party to have access to on the internet, then don't put it on the internet- the very act of doing that means the information won't be private anymore. 99.9999% of users don't care if Google knows they enjoy watching the Wire or what words people didn't know because they searched for its wiki page or what journal articles I look up on Scholar or what companies I've recently read about and decided to look up on finance. In fact most of the people I know that use Google services heavily are more than happy to share that kind of irrelevant information if Google sees some value in it and can use revenue indirectly generated from that to provide us with amazing products like Reader, Groups, Gmail, Android, Code, Scholar, Finance, Books, etc etc etc. In conclusion, information on the internet is not going to private regardless of whose search engine you use or how kitten-friendly their privacy policy is. At least Google has a decent track record of being respectful about your 'private' data while working towards as close to an ideal privacy scenario as it would be possible to get online.
I honestly think you might be pleasantly surprised with Lovin's talk then. If I understood your complaint correctly, this is exactly what he does- walk through a step-by-step solution to the problem of oil dependency. Lovins focuses first on the economics of efficiency, goes through a few proposals on how to improve light vehicle efficiency as an example (including a fully designed and manufacturable high-efficiency cross-over SUV and the advantages of such designs) as well as efficiency in trucking and air travel, following which he goes through a quantitative assessment of the cost of purchasing efficiency, several manners in which foreign oil consumption could be completely eliminated by 2040 (through various mixes of purchasing efficiency and creating alternatives through hydrogen and biofuel) and proposes a few relatively lightweight government programs that could hasten this process.
I do support nuclear, very strongly in fact. The way its being done in the US currently is retarded however. American utilities have taken a very short-term view on project pay-back and cite $7,500 + per-kW prices on new reactors and outlandish per-kWh costs to customers (Lovins has a piece denouncing nuclear because of this, but he doesn't take into consideration that its been done much cheaper elsewhere). Compare that to new reactors being built in India of both Indian and Russian design and its almost shameful. Two Russian 1MW reactors are going up in southern India at a total project cost of around $4 Billion. This is extremely competitive with other alternative energy sources and has the advantage of reliable, predictable and clean power output. By comparison a recent proposal for a 2.7MW plant near Houston reached something to the tune of a $17 Billion initial costing with the manufacturer refusing to commit to any price leaving the door open for massive cost overruns. The NCPIL (Nuclear power corporation of India Limited) by contrast has done amazing work in bringing new nuclear power stations ranging from 220 MW to 2GW online while being very profitable and maintaining forward-thinking policies on nuclear waste recycling through the construction of fast breeder reactors to produce and burn plutonium.
Regardless of whether you think Paul Krugman is a silly radical leftist or if you don't believe humans can or are causing dangerous shifts in climate, it doesn't change the fact that its in the best interest of public health, national security and the American economy to invest in efficiency and next-generation energy sources. We can eliminate our dependency on foreign oil, reduce the level of particulate pollution and environmental damage caused by burning fossil fuels and mining coal and create millions of jobs while making gobs and bogs of money doing it. I see nothing silly or leftist about that. American companies are already pursuing this on their own. Lovins, Krugman and others on both sides of the political spectrum advocate government policies to encourage this although obviously the left-leaning players advocate larger and more direct government involvement. In the end, Federally sponsored research and development through the DOE, NSF, DARPA and ARPA will typically be focused on 20-30 year down-the-road technology while SBIRs and feebates will encourage short term changes in consumer and business behavior toward efficiency and hasten the commercialization of technologies that are 5-10 years away from market. I think all of these elements can contribute in big ways towards all of the goals mentioned earlier but I don't think the loss of any of them on idealogical grounds will seriously hinder the march towards green industry already progress, only perhaps slow it down. The disagreements over the human causes of climate change are really more of an annoying hindrance to getting legislation passed on this that could be huge for the environment, the economy and American competitiveness than a real debate. I think people that argue against a lot of the legislation tied to reducing carbon emissions on the grounds that climate change isn't real are missing the point. A big part of this seems to be an obsessive distrust of anything that's been labeled as a liberal agenda even though many of these policies will drive tremendous economic growth and prosperity.
I'm sure none of his accomplishments or extensive experience as an economist or his proven track record of being "ideologically colorblind" have anything to do with the fact that his ideas on what investment in sustainable energy and efficiency should perhaps be listened to by the general public. Besides, as Amory Lovins says in his TED talk, one could conceivably add almost every major tech company in America let alone the world to the list of organizations recognizing that investment in efficiency has green results in more ways than one. The Nobel Prize in Economics, like the science Prizes, is also significantly more impressive than the Peace Prizes which Gore and Obama won. There are a number of other economists that advocate aggressive investment in efficiency and sustainable energy as one of the surest bets America has to reassert its economic dominance over the world as the BRIC countries continue to grow their economies and political muster in the world, Krugman is simply one of the more widely known and read of these.