Many non-financial benefits of smart grid upgrades are as compelling as those that can save consumers money, according to second-wave findings of the SGCC Consumer Pulse Study, a national survey of U.S. energy consumers conducted for the Smart Grid Consumer Collaborative (SGCC) by Market Strategies International.

The Wave II survey, a follow-up to the initial study begun in August, was conducted with live interviewers by telephone from November 12 to December 6, 2011. A national RDD (random digit dialed) landline and cell phone sample was used. To qualify, a respondent had to be over the age of 18 and a head of household.

The sample design included an oversample of key ethnic and age groups to ensure full representation of the population. Data were weighted by age, ethnicity, gender and region to align with the US national population. The margin of error for the total sample size of 1,003 is +/- 3.1 percentage points at a confidence level of 95%.

Survey participants were asked to rate the importance of seven potential benefits of smart grid and smart meters, including ease of connecting renewable energy sources to the electric grid, reduced outages, new cost-saving rate plans, fewer new power plant investments, increased quality of power delivery, availability of near real-time energy use information and more accurate billing. Critically, each benefit was found to be important to 80% or more of respondents.

“We found that the most commonly-discussed benefits like cost saving and greater power reliability, while important, represent only a part of a broader spectrum of smart grid and smart meter benefits that are appealing to the average consumer,” said SGCC Executive Director Patty Durand. “To achieve greater impact upon a diverse customer base, utilities should take care to bring these other benefits into their marketing messages.”

Consumer education about smart grid remains vital, results show, as awareness and understanding are still lacking. 51% of consumers, a number unchanged since September 2011, say they have never heard the term smart grid, and another 21% say that they have heard the term but don’t know much about what it means.

The majority of consumers who are familiar with smart grid concepts have positive feelings about it. Consumers become increasingly favorable toward the technology after receiving more information about it.

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Recently Facebook Inc. has been working with the state of California concerning incarcerated prisoners who were illegally updating Facebook pages through the use of contraband cell phones and friends outside the prison.

Facebook has agreed to take down the Facebook page of any prisoner who has had his or her account updated either by that individual or by friends outside the prison. Any prisoner who had an existing account prior to being incarcerated will not have their pages deleted.

Prisons do not allow inmates to have cell phones, but, according to the NY Times January 2, 2011 article on the subject, they are often able to obtain these devices by bribing prison guards with up to $1,000 for a single phone.

While visitors are searched both on the way in and out of the prison, guards are not subject to the same searches. Currently, if a guard is found smuggling contraband into the prisoners, the guard is usually fired but no criminal charges are brought.

This has led Senator Alex Padilla to try to have Bill 26 passed in the next few weeks. If it is signed into law, it would make any corrections officer or civilian that provides a prisoner with a cell phone a crime punishable with up to a $5,000 fine and up to six months in jail. Additionally, the inmate who is found with the device would lose “non-restorable loss of time credit.”

This would increase the amount of time the inmate has to spend in prison before he can get out early on good behavior.  If the cell phone was involved in any crime that was committed, an additional 2-5 years would be added to the individual’s sentence.

The main motivation for prohibiting inmates from being able to maintain their Facebook accounts is to prevent continuing criminal activity and to protect any possible past victims from being contacted or stalked by their perpetrator.

The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) recently explained in their periodic newsletter on August 8 that a California inmate had sent accurate, up to date drawings of one of his victims to her home. He had been convicted of child abuse involving the victim seven years prior when the victim was ten years of age.

It was later determined that he had illegally acquired a phone with internet access and used the device to view his victim’s Facebook and Myspace pages, and then used the photos for his drawings.

This problem with prisoners illegally accessing the internet while incarcerated has only become a serious problem in the last few years. The CDCR newsletter reported that while in 2006 only 261 contraband phones were found in the possession of inmates, in 2010 that number jumped to over 7,284.

The increase in the availability and speed of portable internet through the use of smart phones is what has led the CDCR to elicit help from Facebook Inc. This intended to limit the criminal activity that is occurring within the prison system while they work to reduce the number of cell phones that fall into the hands of the incarcerated.

If you suspect that a Facebook account is being updated by an inmate or another person on behalf of the inmate, you can contact the CDCR’s Office of Victim and Survivor Rights & Services toll free at 1-877-256-OVSS (6877) or e-mail victimservices@cdcr.ca.gov.

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The Obama administration is working to provide dissidents with a new tool in their struggle against corrupt regimes: covert communications networks that cannot be shut down by official censors.

According to The New York Times, the government’s plans range from parallel cellphone networks to a futuristic “Internet in a suitcase.”  The innocent-looking piece of luggage could easily be smuggled across a border and provide a highly-portable wireless connection that would give dissident groups a link to the outside world.  In essence, each ‘suitcase’ would act like a miniature cellphone tower and provide the ability to transmit information without using official networks.

In Afghanistan, the State Department and the Pentagon have spent $50 million to create an independent cellphone network to circumvent the Taliban’s attacks on official telecommunications services.  The US is also working to enable mobile phone users to send files directly from phone to phone via Bluetooth.

The recent uprisings in the Arab world have underscored the Internet’s  ability to foment widespread opposition.  Consequently, despots from Cairo to Damascus have sought to block their citizens’ access to the Internet in order to stifle uprisings.  During uprisings in 2009, Iran launched an “Internet slowdown” which made it much more difficult for activists to use social media to mobilize support for their cause.

“No matter how much circumvention the protesters use, if the government slows the network down to a crawl, you can’t upload YouTube videos or Facebook postings,” said Collin Anderson, a liberation-technology researcher who spoke to the New York Times.  “They need alternative ways of sharing information or alternative ways of getting it out of the country,” he continued.

Not all strategies are high tech, however.  In North Korea, America has shown an interest in local dissents who bury Chinese cell phones near the border for use in making clandestine calls.  Among other things, these calls have helped coordinate efforts to smuggle North Korean defectors across the border into China.

The New York Times quoted Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as saying that “There is a historic opportunity to effect positive change, change America supports.”

“So we’re focused on helping them do that, on helping them talk to each other, to their communities, to their governments and to the world,” she continued.

The United States has a long history of using technology to undermine hostile regimes.  In 1940, it began using shortwave radio broadcasts to counter Nazi propaganda in Latin America.  The Voice of America began broadcasting behind enemy lines after America entered World War II.  And during the Cold War, it worked to counter Soviet propaganda.

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A new study published in JAMA investigated the harmful effects of cell phones on the brain.  The conclusion is less than clear.  People have been debating the effects of cell phones since they were first introduced.  There have been scientists and citizens who feel cell phones pose a significant threat.  There are also those who believe we have other things to worry about.

Investigators from the National Institute of Health conducted a study on 47 healthy adults.  The researchers put cell phones to both ears and conducted PET scans of the brain (an imaging technique that measures metabolic activity in the form of glucose consumption) with both phones deactivated, and with the phone adjacent to the right ear activated, in random sequence. Activation of the right cell phone was in mute mode so that participants were blinded to the intervention.

The study found three key points which will do nothing to resolve the cell phone controversy, at least for now.  First, researchers found that whole brain metabolic activity was unaffected by cell phone activation. Second, brain metabolic activity directly adjacent to an activated cell phone was significantly increased. And third, the researchers have no idea what, if any, clinical significance this has.

It is interesting that brain metabolic activity increases with a cell phone but it is not known if that is bad or not.  It is well known that radio-frequency waves penetrate human bodies, and we now know they activate brain activity, but there is no clear evidence they harm us in the process.   The published data, based on many studies and observations in hundreds of thousands of people, remain open to interpretation. One study in the Netherlands examined the issue in over 400,000 people, and found no evidence of harm.  A meta-analysis in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, however, concluded there was possible evidence of increased risk of brain tumors from extended cell phone use demonstrated in studies least subject to bias. Of course cell phones have only been used by a large portion of the population for a decade or two, so certainly more long-term research is needed.

For now, I guess, the cell phone debate will continue with the microwave debate.  All those radioactive waves may turn us into the Hulk someday.  Or maybe not.

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