Sorry, AI won’t “fix” climate change
【能源与环境】 | Energy & Environment
By James Temple（MIT Technology Review），September 28. 2024
OpenAI’s Sam Altman claims AI will deliver an “Intelligence Age,” but tech breakthroughs alone can’t solve global warming.
In an essay last week, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, argued that the accelerating capabilities of AI will usher in an idyllic “Intelligence Age,” unleashing “unimaginable” prosperity and “astounding triumphs” like “fixing the climate.”
It’s a promise that no one is in a position to make—and one that, when it comes to the topic of climate change, fundamentally misunderstands the nature of the problem.
More maddening, the argument suggests that the technology’s massive consumption of electricity today doesn’t much matter, since it will allow us to generate abundant clean power in the future. That casually waves away growing concerns about a technology that’s already accelerating proposals for natural-gas plants and diverting major tech companies from their corporate climate targets.
By all accounts, AI’s energy demands will only continue to increase, even as the world scrambles to build larger, cleaner power systems to meet the increasing needs of EV charging, green hydrogen production, heat pumps, and other low-carbon technologies. Altman himself reportedly just met with White House officials to make the case for building absolutely massive AI data centers, which could require the equivalent of five dedicated nuclear reactors to run.
It’s a bedrock perspective of MIT Technology Review that technological advances can deliver real benefits and accelerate societal progress in meaningful ways. But for decades researchers and companies have oversold the potential of AI to deliver blockbuster medicines, achieve super intelligence, and free humanity from the need to work. To be fair, there have been significant advances, but nothing on the order of what’s been hyped.
Given that track record, I’d argue you need to develop a tool that does more than plagiarize journalism and help students cheat on homework before you can credibly assert that it will solve humanity’s thorniest problems, whether the target is rampant poverty or global warming.
To be sure, AI may help the world address the rising dangers of climate change. We have begun to see research groups and startups harness the technology to try to manage power grids more effectively, put out wildfires faster, and discover materials that could create cheaper, better batteries or solar panels.
All those advances are still relatively incremental. But let’s say AI does bring about an energy miracle. Perhaps its pattern-recognition prowess will deliver the key insight that finally cracks fusion—a technology that Altman is betting on heavily as an investor.
That would be fantastic. But technological advances are just the start—necessary but far from sufficient to eliminate the world’s climate emissions.
How do I know?
Because between nuclear fission plants, solar farms, wind turbines, and batteries, we already have every technology we need to clean up the power sector. This should be the low-hanging fruit of the energy transition. Yet in the largest economy on Earth, fossil fuels still generate 60% of the electricity. The fact that so much of our power still comes from coal, petroleum, and natural gas is a regulatory failure as much as a technological one.
“As long as we effectively subsidize fossil fuels by allowing them to use the atmosphere as a waste dump, we are not allowing clean energy to compete on a level playing field,” Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at the independent research organization Berkeley Earth, wrote on X in a response to Altman’s post. “We need policy changes, not just tech breakthroughs, to meet our climate goals.”
That’s not to say there aren’t big technical problems we still need to solve. Just look at the continuing struggles to develop clean, cost-competitive ways of fertilizing crops or flying planes. But the fundamental challenges of climate change are sunk costs, development obstacles, and inertia.
We’ve built and paid for a global economy that spews out planet-warming gases, investing trillions of dollars in power plants, steel mills, factories, jets, boilers, water heaters, stoves, and SUVs that run on fossil fuels. And few people or companies will happily write off those investments so long as those products and plants still work. AI can’t remedy all that just by generating better ideas.
To raze and replace the machinery of every industry around the world at the speed now required, we will need increasingly aggressive climate policies that incentivize or force everyone to switch to cleaner plants, products, and practices.
But with every proposal for a stricter law or some big new wind or solar farm, forces will push back, because the plan will hit someone’s wallet, block someone’s views, or threaten the areas or traditions someone cherishes. Climate change is an infrastructure problem, and building infrastructure is a messy human endeavor.
Tech advances can ease some of these issues. Cheaper, better alternatives to legacy industries make hard choices more politically palatable. But there are no improvements to AI algorithms or underlying data sets that solve the challenge of NIMBYism, the conflict between human interests, or the desire to breathe the fresh air in an unsullied wilderness.
To assert that a single technology—that just happens to be the one your company develops—can miraculously untangle these intractable conflicts of human society is at best self-serving, if not a little naïve. And it’s a troubling idea to proclaim at a point when the growth of that very technology is threatening to undermine the meager progress the world has begun to make on climate change.
As it is, the one thing we can state confidently about generative AI is that it’s making the hardest problem we’ve ever had to solve that much harder to solve.
Reprinted from MIT Technology Review
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Davos 2024: Sam Altman on the future of AI
President Sally Kornbluth and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman discuss the future of AI
AI ask, I answer | Energy management
By Chen Ya, Jointing.Media, 2024-10-06
Doubao: How does social interaction versus alone time affect our energy levels?
Chenya: During the daytime you spend more time communicating with others and dealing with things, it means you transfer your power and energy to others.It’s a way to consume your energy.
But if you stay by yourself and do what you want to do, it’s like charging your energy from those activities.
So, if you want to manage your energy, you should know where you can get the energy. And if you consume too much energy during the daytime, you will need more time to recover and regain the energy in your own way.
Doubao: I think it’s an insightful perspective. Recognizing how we expend and replenish our energy throughout the day is crucial for maintaining balance and welt-being. It’s important to find a balance between interacting with others and having alone time for self-care and recharging.
We do often give a lot of our energy when dealing with various tasks and people during the day. Making sure to consciously set aside time for activities that rejuvenate us is essential.
However, it can also be beneficial-to learn how to find moments of energy restoration even within our-busy social interactions and tasks.
what do you think about all this?
Chen Ya: I mean, regarding energy management, Qi and blood, in traditional Chinese medicine, are used to handle too many matters, and these matters will inevitably consume your energy. And this energy needs to be regenerated and returned to your body. Then you need to have your own way.
Some people might need to relax or do exercise.
Some people need to chat with friends.
Some people might solve this problem by having a meal,
While some people need to take a nap.
And some others might need time to be alone to restore their vitality and energy.
Everyone is like having a field when you interact with good fields and fields that are superior to yours, you might absorb some positive energy. But inevitably, you will encounter some negative energy.
At this time, you will expend energy to resist this interference.You could say it is equivalent to a kind of balance.
The more energy you have, the more and the better you can do. When the energy is relatively low, people appear more negative and depressed. When the energy is very, veiny low, that person gets sick. Therefore, maintaining a high energy state is a sign of good health.
Edited by Wind and Doubao
Photo by Sacima （2024）
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JM Review | There is no Education for a Country, Only for a Person
【观点】| Insight
By Jointing.Media, in Shanghai, 2023-09-30
The Harvard Drama School teacher in the story is a careful observer of his students and has extensive experience in teaching children with high IQs. The whole process of finding problems, gathering information, analysing information, making plans and solving problems also reflects the teacher’s good guidance in training new employees in the workplace. In it, JM saw what ‘teaching and learning’ is all about.
JM believes that there is no education suitable for China, education suitable for Japan or education suitable for the United States, only education suitable for people. Although the cultures of different countries are different, they all follow the law of “the purpose of education determines the creation of the educational environment”. If we want obedient people, we reward teachers and students who follow the rules. If we want creative people, we reward teachers and students who break the rules… The managers of the education industry are the creators of the micro-environment and the industry environment, and at the same time they are the products of the environment, like teachers and students.
Soil conditions for apple trees are PH 5-8, while peach trees need soil with PH 4.9-5.2. It can be seen that different pH levels of soil produce different fruits, and it can also be used to artificially change soil conditions to produce any fruit. Although fruit cannot choose the right soil, people can. The Chinese idiom “Meng mother moved three times” tells the story of Meng Ke’s mother who moved three times in ancient times to choose a good environment for her children’s education. The same is true today, when many parents travel the world with their children, using global educational resources to help them grow.
After Zhou Yijun, a well-known journalist, became a mother, her anxiety about her role as a mother prompted her to research the educational situation in different countries and make a documentary called Childhood in a Foreign Land. She concluded: “Education is how a country defines its citizens. Countries have different needs for their citizens and education is different in many ways”. But what if a nation needed slaves?
If a citizen does not approve of the education methods in his/her own country, he/she will choose to go elsewhere. However, most people can only be forced to adapt to the environment, but are powerless to change the environment. Nevertheless, individuals should avoid living in the cocoon of information, and should micro-innovate and micro-change their own environment, and expand more opportunities for their own lives and those of their children through self-education. The education of the person, after all, is to enable the person to become a free, self-defined person, not a person defined by the state.
Edited by Wind, Youdao and DeepL
Image :The Dolomites in Italy (2024 ) | SQM’s photograph
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A ‘liquid battery’ advance
【能源与环境】 | Energy & Environment
By John Tibbetts，Stanford Report，June 13th, 2024
A Stanford team aims to improve options for renewable energy storage through work on an emerging technology – liquids for hydrogen storage.
Getty Images / tommy
As California transitions rapidly to renewable fuels, it needs new technologies that can store power for the electric grid. Solar power drops at night and declines in winter. Wind power ebbs and flows. As a result, the state depends heavily on natural gas to smooth out highs and lows of renewable power.
“The electric grid uses energy at the same rate that you generate it, and if you’re not using it at that time, and you can’t store it, you must throw it away,” said Robert Waymouth, the Robert Eckles Swain Professor in Chemistry in the School of Humanities and Sciences.
Waymouth is leading a Stanford team to explore an emerging technology for renewable energy storage: liquid organic hydrogen carriers (LOHCs). Hydrogen is already used as fuel or a means for generating electricity, but containing and transporting it is tricky.
“We are developing a new strategy for selectively converting and long-term storing of electrical energy in liquid fuels,” said Waymouth, senior author of a study detailing this work in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. “We also discovered a novel, selective catalytic system for storing electrical energy in a liquid fuel without generating gaseous hydrogen.”
Liquid batteries
Batteries used to store electricity for the grid – plus smartphone and electric vehicle batteries – use lithium-ion technologies. Due to the scale of energy storage, researchers continue to search for systems that can supplement those technologies.
According to the California Energy Commission: “From 2018 to 2024, battery storage capacity in California increased from 500 megawatts to more than 10,300 MW, with an additional 3,800 MW planned to come online by the end of 2024. The state projects 52,000 MW of battery storage will be needed by 2045.”
Among the candidates are LOHCs, which can store and release hydrogen using catalysts and elevated temperatures. Someday, LOHCs could widely function as “liquid batteries,” storing energy and efficiently returning it as usable fuel or electricity when needed.
The Waymouth team studies isopropanol and acetone as ingredients in hydrogen energy storage and release systems. Isopropanol – or rubbing alcohol – is a high-density liquid form of hydrogen that could be stored or transported through existing infrastructure until it’s time to use it as a fuel in a fuel cell or to release the hydrogen for use without emitting carbon dioxide.
Yet methods to produce isopropanol with electricity are inefficient. Two protons from water and two electrons can be converted into hydrogen gas, then a catalyst can produce isopropanol from this hydrogen. “But you don’t want hydrogen gas in this process,” said Waymouth. “Its energy density per unit volume is low. We need a way to make isopropanol directly from protons and electrons without producing hydrogen gas.”
Daniel Marron, lead author of this study who recently completed his Stanford PhD in chemistry, identified how to address this issue. He developed a catalyst system to combine two protons and two electrons with acetone to generate the LOHC isopropanol selectively, without generating hydrogen gas. He did this using iridium as the catalyst.
A key surprise was that cobaltocene was the magic additive. Cobaltocene, a chemical compound of cobalt, a non-precious metal, has long been used as a simple reducing agent and is relatively inexpensive. The researchers found that cobaltocene is unusually efficient when used as a co-catalyst in this reaction, directly delivering protons and electrons to the iridium catalyst rather than liberating hydrogen gas, as was previously expected.
A fundamental future
Cobalt is already a common material in batteries and in high demand, so the Stanford team is hoping their new understanding of cobaltocene’s properties could help scientists develop other catalysts for this process. For example, the researchers are exploring more abundant, non-precious earth metal catalysts, such as iron, to make future LOHC systems more affordable and scalable.
Related story
“This is basic fundamental science, but we think we have a new strategy for more selectively storing electrical energy in liquid fuels,” said Waymouth.
As this work evolves, the hope is that LOHC systems could improve energy storage for industry and energy sectors or for individual solar or wind farms.
And for all the complicated and challenging work behind the scenes, the process, as summarized by Waymouth, is actually quite elegant: “When you have excess energy, and there’s no demand for it on the grid, you store it as isopropanol. When you need the energy, you can return it as electricity.”
For more information
Additional Stanford co-authors are Conor Galvin, PhD ’23, and PhD student Julia Dressel. Waymouth is also a member of Stanford Bio-X and the Stanford Cancer Institute, a faculty fellow of Sarafan ChEM-H, and an affiliate of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment.
This work was funded by the National Science Foundation.
Reprinted from Stanford Report
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ESG Does Not Measure a Firm’s Social Impact
【企业社会责任与可持续发展】| CSR & Sustainability
By R. David McLean，March 22, 2024
Advocates of investing based on environmental, social, and governance factors, or ESG, promised that it would transform how business performance is measured, to society’s benefit. Yet, far from being revolutionary, ESG is just the most recent manifestation of an old fallacy—that businesses create wealth for their owners but little else of value for society.
When a business makes a profit, its trading partners or stakeholders, including customers, employees, and suppliers, also gain. Yet these gains are ignored by ESG and other rating schemes that claim to measure the firm’s impact on society.
A business’ stakeholders freely choose whether to trade with it or not. A customer buys a product if the product’s value to the customer exceeds the product’s price. An employee works for a firm because what the employee receives in exchange exceeds what any other available job would offer. A supplier agrees to sell the firm its goods or services if the selling price creates a profit for the supplier. All these stakeholder gains reflect profit-making businesses making positive contributions to society.
A recent National Bureau of Economic Research paper considers all this and estimates a firm’s social impact by measuring the benefits accruing to its shareholders and various stakeholders. It also accounts for negative externalities—harmful side effects a business may produce—including CO2 emissions.
Which of the firms included in the study had the largest positive social impact? Walmart.
Yes, Walmart scored highest because it is large, so its business impacts many people. It sells products at low prices primarily to lower-income consumers, who reported that they would find it difficult to buy the same products at higher prices.
Yet Walmart has only an average ESG rating, according to Sustainalytics, a major ESG rating firm. The study found this discordance was common, concluding, “Existing ESG and social impact ratings are essentially unrelated to our economically grounded measures.”
What do ESG scores measure? ESG is a subjective rating scheme. It reflects the beliefs of the persons who issue the ratings. ESG was created by United Nations (UN) bureaucrats working in concert with executives from the finance industry. Its purpose is to use corporate assets to promote ideological causes that progressives favor.
In practice, ESG has proven to be incoherent. A 2022 study by MIT researchers examined six different ESG scores from six rating firms and found that their methodologies varied greatly. For example, one rating firm used 282 inputs, whereas another used only 38. The study also reports that the six ESG ratings are not highly correlated. As one of the study’s authors put it, “the six never all agreed on a company’s ESG rating, and in most cases there was little agreement among them.”
Before ESG came on the scene, the same global institutions now at the forefront of promoting it, including the UN, World Bank, and World Economic Forum, were busy promoting another economic fallacy—that the world had too many people and was rapidly running out of natural resources. They argued that limiting population growth was the only way to reduce poverty and avoid societal collapse.
The population fallacy was responsible for China’s infamous one-child policy, which led to millions of forced abortions and sterilizations. It also resulted in millions of forced sterilizations in India, financed by lending from the World Bank and the United Nations Population Fund.
And for what? The human toll aside, macroeconomic data clearly show population control’s ineffectiveness as a means of poverty reduction.
India and China have more people and greater prosperity today than in the 1970s, when population control efforts were at their peak. More generally, in 1970, 45 percent of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty, whereas today it is only 8 percent. Yet the world’s population more than doubled during this same period.
What caused the reduction in poverty? It was primarily market reforms in China and India that limited the government’s role in the economy and encouraged more market activity. Profit-seeking businesses then created wealth, goods, services, and jobs, just as they do in the United States and Western Europe.
We can see such effects across countries as well: rich countries have an abundance of profit-seeking firms, while poor countries do not.
ESG and other subjective rating schemes do not reflect how business improves the state of humanity. What ESG does is divert corporate resources from profit-seeking, which benefits all of society, toward ideological causes that progressives and some global institutions favor.
China and India did not pull millions out of poverty by embracing ESG, stakeholder capitalism, or any of the other monikers popular in today’s business lingo, but by freeing their people’s entrepreneurial spirits. What better evidence is there that profit-seeking firms benefit all of humanity?
David McLean is the William G. Droms Professor of Finance and Finance Area Chair at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business. His research interests are in stock return predictability, behavioral finance, and the interplay between financial markets and corporate investment. David’s papers have been published in leading finance journals, such as the Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, and Review of Financial Studies. His research has won several awards, including the Amundi Smith Breeden Award for the best paper in the Journal of Finance and the Jensen Prize for the best paper in the Journal of Financial Economics. Major media outlets, including the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, New York Times, and the Economist have covered his research. David serves on the editorial boards of several academic journals, including Management Science and the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis. He is the author of the book The Case for Shareholder Capitalism: How the Pursuit of Profit Benefits All.
Reprinted from Real Clear Policy
Edited by Wind
Image : The Udaipur in India (2024 ) | SQM’s photograph
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‘Sustainability’ Is the Most Misleading of the New Business Buzzwords
‘Sustainability’ Is the Most Misleading of the New Business Buzzwords
【企业社会责任与可持续发展】| CSR & Sustainability
By R. David McLean，Cato Institute，May 14, 2024
Earlier this year Hertz announced it was selling 20,000 of the electric vehicles in its fleet and would buy gas-powered vehicles instead.
The reason? Electric vehicles are too expensive to maintain, and more customers prefer gas-powered cars.
Hertz is taking a $245 million loss on the sale. The company’s CEO, who increased electric vehicles’ share of its fleet, resigned.
After all that, is Hertz a more, or less, sustainable company?
One study estimates that a single electric vehicle receives over $48,000 in subsidies over a 10-year lifetime. The tax credits and rebates that most people are familiar with add up to nearly $9,000. Is it fair to describe a product as sustainable if it needs to be subsidized this much?
Oil companies are supposedly unsustainable. Yet 11 of the world’s top 25 most profitable companies, such as Exxon, Shell, and Chevron, are fossil fuel companies. None of them need subsidies to survive.
In contrast, Siemens Energy, one of the world’s largest wind turbine manufacturers, lost $4.5 billion in 2023. The German government recently gave it a rescue package worth $16 billion in U.S. dollars. Which is a more sustainable business, Siemens or the fossil fuel companies?
Calling something sustainable does not make it so. Firms that cannot make consistent profits will either have to be subsidized or die. It does not matter if they make solar panels or pump oil.
Investing in companies that make windmills, solar panels, and electric vehicles in the absence of profits is a bet that governments will continue subsidizing them. Calling that “sustainable investing” misrepresents reality.
Continuing to subsidize such businesses will be very expensive. The $16 billion Siemens got from the German government is small potatoes.
The European Round Table for Industry recently stated that it will cost Europeans $853 billion USD by 2030 and $2.66 trillion by 2050 to meet the goal of net zero C02 emissions by 2050. That money could instead be invested in schools, hospitals, roads, new technologies, cures for diseases, and many other things that can benefit humanity today and in the foreseeable future. Yet, the sustainability moniker doesn’t delve into those issues.
That’s because the sustainability moniker’s use in the business world has nothing to do with the actual meaning of the word. Rather, it originated among progressives working at the United Nations, the World Economic Forum, and in the finance industry to promote progressive agendas that most people do not favor.
The Oxford Languages dictionary defines sustainable as “able to be maintained at a certain rate or level.” Some fund managers such as BlackRock define sustainable investing as investing in so-called ESG funds—those promoting “environmental, social, and governance” goals.
But ESG is not in the definition of sustainable. Rather, it is a subjective rating scheme promoting environmental and social causes that progressives favor. We can debate the merits of those causes, but an honest debate requires not placing misleading labels on them.
David McLean is the William G. Droms Professor of Finance and Finance Area Chair at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business. His research interests are in stock return predictability, behavioral finance, and the interplay between financial markets and corporate investment. David’s papers have been published in leading finance journals, such as the Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, and Review of Financial Studies. His research has won several awards, including the Amundi Smith Breeden Award for the best paper in the Journal of Finance and the Jensen Prize for the best paper in the Journal of Financial Economics. Major media outlets, including the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, New York Times, and the Economist have covered his research. David serves on the editorial boards of several academic journals, including Management Science and the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis. He is the author of the book The Case for Shareholder Capitalism: How the Pursuit of Profit Benefits All.
Reprinted from Cato Institute
ESG Does Not Measure a Firm’s Social Impact
This chart shows why heat pumps are still hot in the US
【能源与环境】 | Energy & Environment
By Casey Crownhart, MIT Technology Review，2024-02-12
Sales slowed in 2023, but heat pumps are gaining ground on fossil fuels.
STEPHANIE ARNETT/MITTR | ENVATO
Heat pumps are still a hot technology, though sales in the US, one of the world’s largest markets, fell in 2023. Even with the drop, the appliances beat out gas furnaces for the second year in a row and saw their overall market share increase compared to furnaces, sales of which also fell last year.
Heat pumps heat and cool spaces using electricity, and they could be a major tool in the effort to cut greenhouse gas emissions. (About 10% of global emissions are generated from heating buildings.) Many homes and other buildings around the world use fossil fuels for heating in systems like gas furnaces—heat pumps are generally more efficient, and crucially, can be powered using renewable electricity. Experts say heat pump sales will need to grow quickly in order to keep buildings safe and comfortable while meeting climate goals.
Heat pumps have been around for decades, but the technology has been experiencing a clear moment in the sun in recent years, with global sales increasing by double digits in both 2021 and 2022, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). Heat pumps were featured on MIT Technology Review’s 2024 list of 10 Breakthrough Technologies.
Sales fell by nearly 17% in 2023 in the US, one of the technology’s largest markets, according to new data from the Air-Conditioning, Heating, and Refrigeration Institute. The slowdown comes after nearly a decade of constant growth. The AHRI data isn’t comprehensive, but the organization includes manufacturers accounting for about 90% of the units sold in the US annually.
Annual US heat pump and gas furnace sales
However, the decline likely says less about heat pumps than it does about the whole HVAC sector, since gas furnaces and air conditioners saw even steeper drops. Gas furnace sales declined even more than heat pumps did in 2023, so heat pumps actually made up a slightly larger percentage of sales this year than in 2022.
The broad slowdown reflects broader consumer pessimism amid higher interest rates and inflation, says Yannick Monschauer, an analyst at the IEA, via email.
“We have also been observing slowing heat pump sales in other parts of the world for 2023,” Monschauer adds. In Europe, a rush to electrify, driven by the energy crisis and rising natural gas prices, has slowed.
New incentives programs could help speed progress in 2024 and beyond. The Inflation Reduction Act, a sweeping climate bill passed in 2022, includes individual tax credits for up to $2,000 towards a new heat pump, which went into effect at the beginning of 2023.
However, the more generous incentives in that law have yet to take effect, says Wael Kanj, a research associate at Rewiring America, a nonprofit group focused on electrification in the US.
New rebates set aside funding of up to $8,000 towards a new heat pump system for low- and middle-income households. Distributing the rebates is up to individual states, and analysts anticipate those programs getting up and running in late 2024, or early 2025, Kanj says.
Heat pumps are a crucial component of plans to combat climate change. In a scenario where the world reaches net-zero emissions by 2050, heat pumps need to account for 20% of global heating capacity by the end of this decade, according to an IEA analysis.
“The next five, ten, 15 years are really going to be important,” Kanj says. “We definitely need to pick up the pace.”
Reprinted from MIT Technology Review .
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JM Review | No Innovation Environment Here
【观点】| Insight
By Jointing.Media, in Shanghai, 2023-12-30
According to the National Bureau of Statistics, the unemployment rate for young people (aged 16-24) was 21.3% in June this year, the highest since the start of the graduation season in January 2018.
According to statistics recently released by the Ministry of Education, the number of applicants for the 2024 postgraduate entrance exams fell sharply for the first time in a decade, to 4.38 million.
As of 24 October, more than 2.91 million people had registered for the 2024 national exam, a new record high, according to statistics provided by Zhonggong Education. The average competition ratio is 66:1. Judging by the registration situation for the National Examination in the past three years, the fever has not abated: the number of applicants for the National Examination in 2021 is more than 1.5 million, the number of applicants for the National Examination in 2022 is more than 2.02 million, and the number of applicants for the National Examination in 2023 is more than 2.5 million.
11 December 2023 will be the 112th anniversary of Qian Xuesen’s birth. Thirteen years ago, Qian Lao said that after returning to China after so many years, he felt that there was no such school (like Caltech) in China, and there was no university in China that could run a school according to the mode of training scientific and technological invention and creation talents. The words are still ringing in my ears. The environment is an important educational resource. The university environment is influenced by the social environment, whether our social environment is free and relaxed, suitable for innovation, whether there are channels to express different opinions, and whether those who dare to challenge authority are not suppressed…
The German philosopher Jaspers believed that the process of education is first a process of spiritual growth and then it becomes part of the process of scientific knowledge. The school should create an intellectual and spiritual foundation for a person. The purpose of the school is to translate the spiritual content of mankind in history into the dynamic spirit of today, and through this spirit to lead all students to acquire knowledge and technology. Today, in universities and colleges, the endless recruitment of students, the multiplication of so-called necessary lectures and exercises, the stuffing of students’ minds with such things as “instruments” under forms, while the repeated loss of the “way” of true existence, undoubtedly blocks the passage of the student to the spirit of freedom. The unsystematic specialisation and knowledge, the teaching of examination skills, etc., all weaken the original spiritual life, weaken the student’s ability to reflect, as well as the independent personality and the habit of repeatedly thinking about a problem.
China’s higher education reform started in 1978. In the comprehensive reform period from 2010 to now, the theme is comprehensive quality improvement, and the main measures include promoting innovation and entrepreneurship education, transforming and developing local undergraduate colleges and universities, and implementing “double first-class” construction. More than ten years later, what is the state of our university’s environment? Is it developing in the direction expected by Qian Lao?
Edited by Wind, Youdao and DeepL
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JM Review | Yu Leiming: Rescuer of Over 2,000 Stray Animals, Remembered
By Jointing.Media, in Shanghai, 2023-10-06
Through social media posts, we learned of the passing of this remarkable man: Yu Leiming, who left us for heaven on August 5, 2023, at the age of 46. It is a regret that JMers, members of our community, failed to share his story and the tales of his ‘fur kids’ during his lifetime. JM now compile accounts from various sources, hoping to piece together fragments of an ordinary yet beautiful soul—because he deserves to be remembered by this world
The story of Yu Lei ming and stray animals reminds me of the classic Japanese film The Story of Hachikō(ハチ公物語 (1987)), adapted in the U.S. and China. Just as “There are a thousand Hamlets in a thousand eyes,” perspectives on Yu’s devotion to rescuing stray animals vary drastically. To some, his selflessness seemed ‘unworthy’—sacrificing his own well-being for animals, neglecting his parents, ending a nine-year relationship, or ‘wasting’ resources on animals instead of humans. Reading such comments, JM cannot help but ask:
What truly defines the bond between humans and pets—ownership, kinship, or something else?
How do we morally distinguish abandoning infants, the elderly, and pets?
Why do so many abandon pets? What systemic failures enable this, and how can we address them?
Why do rescuers like Yu, who dedicate their lives and livelihoods to saving animals, struggle to survive with dignity? What barriers prevent ‘Yu Leimings’ from securing sustainable support?
In the face of societal challenges, most observe outcomes, some question causes, fewer seek solutions, and a rare few take action—even in small ways. Undeniably, Yu Leiming belongs to that admirable, vanishingly small group of problem-solvers.
Edited by Wind and DeepSeek
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Can we use plastic waste to build roads, buildings, and more?
Stanford engineers Michael Lepech and Zhiye Li have a unique vision of the future: buildings and roads made from plastic waste.
As part of a federal white paper evaluating the possibility of using plastic waste in infrastructure, Stanford researchers analyzed a California road project that used plastic bottles in asphalt. (Image credit: Caltrans)
In a new white paper commissioned by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), Lepech and Li study the current status, challenges, and needs of recycling plastics in a circular economy, and examine the long-term durability and environmental costs of doing so for use in infrastructure. Using a mix of computer modeling, scientific research, experimental and field data, as well as interviews with recycling industry stakeholders, Lepech and Li analyze case studies using plastic waste for façade panels in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and pavement in a California Department of Transportation road project. Among other results, their findings indicate that recycled glass fiber reinforced polymer composite – a tensile plastic commonly used in car, boat, and plane parts – is a promising material for reuse in buildings.
NASEM published the white paper as an appendix to its recent report to Congress, the U.S. Department of Transportation, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and may use it as the basis of recommendations to policymakers.
Below, Lepech, a professor of civil and environmental engineering, and Li, a postdoctoral scholar in civil and environmental engineering, discuss obstacles, opportunities, and other aspects of transforming or upcycling plastic waste into valuable materials.
What are some of the biggest obstacles for repurposing plastic waste into infrastructure applications?
Lepech: One of the challenges that we and others identified through this work is the difficult economics and logistics of managing plastic waste streams from municipal solid waste. Plastic waste material flow is highly variable. Its mass can change from month to month, as can the type of plastic – lots of different packaging, for example.
What about the big opportunities?
Lepech: The recycling of entire buildings made of polymer composites at the end of their useful lives could be a game changer. That’s because the amount of material, along with its likely uniform composition, would make recycling it into another infrastructure application significantly easier.
Li: Our paper gives a few recommendations: Improve waste sorting, encourage and support plastic upcycling innovation, set up a performance database of certain plastic blends, and establish predictable models for these materials’ durability under different use conditions.
What lessons does upcycling of plastic waste for infrastructure hold for other circular economy efforts?
Li: Upcycling of recycled plastics in infrastructure sets an example of creating value by creating demand. The recycled plastic blended construction material needs to achieve certain performance requirements and maintain lower environmental impacts than conventional construction materials. Our paper shows that for a use case that has a longer lifespan – such as certain blended plastic composite building panels or asphalt pavement, the needed quality and sustainability requirements are more achievable.
Upcycling plastic waste has obvious environmental advantages. What are the business/profit advantages?
Lepech: Among the many potential advantages, firms that are part of a circular economy value chain may see regulatory advantages, such as extended protection of an explicit or implicit license to operate or greater flexibility with regulatory agencies. There are obvious operational efficiencies possible when not relying upon virgin fossil resources. From the standpoint of risk management, there could be reduced potential for environmental emergencies, such as oil spills, and reduced insurance premiums. There is certainly opportunity for growth by targeting markets that value environmentally friendly or sustainable products. Finally, firms can achieve increased clarity in strategic direction when they align value chains with corporate mission, especially in the case of environmentally conscious firms.
Beyond buildings and roadways, what are some major potential applications for upcycling plastic waste?
Li: Upcycling plastic waste in infrastructure has attracted increasing interest because it creates something of high value for which there is large potential demand. Beyond buildings, there are many applications for reusing plastic, but not many that would use as much plastic waste or last as long. For example, packaging consumes more than 60% of global recycled plastic, but has a short lifespan. Some automotive parts can be made with recycled plastic, but they require relatively little plastic to produce.
Lepech is also faculty director of the Stanford Center at the Incheon Global Campus, a research center in Korea focused on smart, sustainable cities and urban communities, and a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. Li is also a researcher at Stanford’s John A. Blume Earthquake Engineering Center and the Stanford Center at the Incheon Global Campus.
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