The race is on – when will Eagle Ford and Bakken hit a million barrels a day?

I’ve been tracking predictions for when Bakken hits a million barrels a day. Both Carpe Diem and Million Dollar Way put a prediction on the table today.

Check out the astounding increase in production in Eagle Ford shown in the graph from Carpe Diem: Energy fact of the day: Eagle Ford Shale sets new oil output record in May, will likely surpass Bakken Shale next year.

Production in May was 581,923 bopd, per the preliminary report.

Continue reading “The race is on – when will Eagle Ford and Bakken hit a million barrels a day?”

More industries transformed by tech revolution – truck driving, legal field

How about truck driving as a threatened field?

The Wall Street Journal article provides a question you may hear soon: Daddy, What Was a Truck Driver?

Truck driving

Continue reading “More industries transformed by tech revolution – truck driving, legal field”

What do you do if your cloud-based mission critical application is down for an indefinite time? Illustration from a reader for RSS feeds.

(Cross-post from my other blog, Nonprofit Update.)

Update: The Old Reader back up at end of work day Thursday – that makes 1 1/2 days of the weekend and 4 workdays it was down.

Update 2: Shortly after coming back up, Old Reader went down again. After coming back up, they announced the move to a ‘private model’, meaning anyone who signed up after the Google announcement would get dropped.  I understand – this has been a hobby for them and free to users.  Then they said ‘never mind’, everyone could stay. They have been down a few times since then while migrating to new hardware.  Um, that sort of proves the point of this post.

Your tech provider may go off-line for an indefinite time.  Another reason not to let your technology hold you captive.

The Old Reader went down around lunchtime on Saturday, 7-20, and isn’t back up just before lunch on Wednesday, 7-24. That’s four days – most of the weekend and one-half of a work-week. No public estimate when it will return.

Don’t be held captive by your technology.

Continue reading “What do you do if your cloud-based mission critical application is down for an indefinite time? Illustration from a reader for RSS feeds.”

More good stuff on surveillance – 7-23-13

There are a lot of articles discussing the surveillance world we now live in. I would like to comment on many of them in a full post. Alas, time does not permit.

I will start putting up a list of good stuff that I’d like talk about but only have time to recommend with a quick comment. Hopefully this will be a frequent list of links.

Here’s my first list:

Foreign Policy – The CIA’s New Black Bag Is Digital – When the NSA can’t break into your computer, these guys break into your house – Continue reading “More good stuff on surveillance – 7-23-13”

Air travel at record level in North Dakota

Record increases in boardings over last year.  Statewide increase of 9%, according to Bismark Tribune, N.D. airports post highest June boarding ever.

Article says boardings out of Williston tripled since June 2012.

That makes sense –  United and Delta flights to Williston started since last June; last fall as I recall.

Jet service from Dickinson to Denver and Minneapolis started in June 2013.

Obviously the oil boom is driving that traffic increase.

New tech is changing undersea drilling too – peak oil #27

Amazing technology developments are making drilling in the ocean easier, reducing cost, and revealing the locations of hard-to-find oil.

Six Tech Advancements Changing the Fossil Fuels Game at Rigzone outlines the changes.

I like this sentence that points out what everyone knows (specifically that a particular well or field only so much oil and will eventually run dry) with what the peak oilers refuse to believe (that there is another field to drill which is now reachable with new technology):

Rig advancements are coming online in tandem with the significantly increased momentum to drill in deeper waters as shallower reserves run out. 

Oh, and advancement in technology is just one of several fatal flaws to the “peak oil” foolishness.

Here’s some of the new tech. One of the 6 applies to drilling on land – at least I think it doesn’t apply to deep-sea drilling.

Continue reading “New tech is changing undersea drilling too – peak oil #27”

The establishment pushes back against the education revolution

There is a revolution going on in education. Many writers are talking about the education bubble at the primary, secondary, and collegiate level.  My preferred metaphor is an open frontier.  You can see my posts here.

An article in Chronicle of Higher Education, The Gates Effect, gives good background on the role of the Gates Foundation in advocating education reform.

The long article attacks the Gates Foundation strongly and repeatedly.  It is the latest is a series of critical articles.  Seems to me most of the current article is focused on giving voice to those pushing back against the changes taking place in the education world.

What I hear as the primary theme of the above article is that only those inside the education establishment should speak to reform.

As to the substance of the criticism, that is the topic for widespread discussion for several years.

Gates Foundation is one of the movers behind the education revolution

Continue reading “The establishment pushes back against the education revolution”

North Dakota oil production sets another record in 5-13

Production state-wide hit 810,314 bopd in May, up 2.07% from revised April amount of 793,913 bopd.

Here’s a graph:

 bakken production 5-13

Six month increase

That is an increase of only 8.1% over six months, which was the last month before the winter impacts hit.

Continue reading “North Dakota oil production sets another record in 5-13”

The reach of federal data gathering is beyond imagination (most people call that spying)

Barry Ritholtz summarizes the currently known scope of information being gathered by the U.S. government in his post, How Much Is the US Government Spying on Americans.

There is an extensive list of the ways and means of data gathering in the long article. There are multiple dozens of links to other articles if you want more background on any specific point he makes.

Here’s a good summary: Continue reading “The reach of federal data gathering is beyond imagination (most people call that spying)”

Issues on hand from the oil-loaded train crash in Canada

Current estimate is around 50 people were killed in a train derailment in Lac-Mégantic, Canada a week ago. That’s a distressing estimate because many people are still missing and only a few bodies have been recovered.

A few articles for background:

There will be plenty of issues to deal with from the disaster: regulation, train safety, our reliance on oil, pipeline vs rail transport.

An article at The Globe and Mail, Harsh Lessons, imperfect answers in Lac-Mégantic, by Margaret Wente starts to outline the issues.

Continue reading “Issues on hand from the oil-loaded train crash in Canada”

Autonomous drone lands itself on aircraft carrier

Update – Third attempt on 7-15-13 unsuccessful. Frequent failures are the price of innovation. Two successful landings is very cool. 

Here’s an amazing first:  a self-flying drone, the X-47B, took off from land at Patuxent NAS, flew to the U.S.S. George H. W. Bush and landed itself. It was then launched off the catapult and landed again.

Check out the video in the WSJ article: Navy Drone Successfully Lands on Aircraft Carrier.

There wasn’t an operator on the ground controlling the drone – it flew itself. Very cool.

Continue reading “Autonomous drone lands itself on aircraft carrier”

Mali update – 7-10-13

Not much news from Mali that I’ve noticed. There is progress, but at a deeper level than I can see in the few news sources I watch. I suppose that is only a commentary on me.

7-8 – Economist – Secure the Sahara, if you can

Three pieces of very good news, at least from my limited perspective. From the article: Continue reading “Mali update – 7-10-13”

Education revolution is underway

Two articles in The Economist provide an overview of the major upheaval underway in education.

The lead article is E-ducation.  The in-depth article is Catching on at last.

The articles cover much of what is going on the education world.  I’ve tried to touch on those issues on this blog.

Check out the two articles for better explained, more in-depth descriptions.

Here is a recap of several of the major trends, from the lead article. I’ve split two very long sentences into key ideas: Continue reading “Education revolution is underway”

Survey of shale oil; also the Peak Oil Myth – #26

Matt Ridley provides an overview of the flood of fracked shale oil in his post, The dash for shale oil will shake the world.

He points to The Shale Oil Boom: a US Phenomenon, a newly released report from Leonardo Maugeri.

I’ve mentioned this in the past, but look again at the explosion of estimated recoverable oil in Bakken: Continue reading “Survey of shale oil; also the Peak Oil Myth – #26”

Be careful when predicting who will win the tech battles – search engine illustration

Don’t be too confident when you guess who will win the battles for market share and who is destined to disappear. Remember when Yahoo was the dominant search engine provider?

When that upstart outfit, Google, appeared on the scene in 1998 who would have predicted it to be the dominant search engine in 2013, a mere 15 years later?

My friend John Bredehoft creates a forecast from 1998 using information available at the time in his post, In which I apply the wisdom of 1998 to an old Salon article.

If he was blogging at the time, he guesses he would have not given Google much of a chance to succeed against Excite, Lycos, AOL, MSN, and Yahoo. He would have guessed the new Disney search engine would fare better than Google and several others.

His hypothetical comment about Google: Continue reading “Be careful when predicting who will win the tech battles – search engine illustration”