Researchers in Japan have designed an organic, disposable sensor that alerts caregivers when a new diaper is needed on a baby. It is made of a thin plastic film, which is embedded in a diaper for a few cents. (Investor’s Business Daily, paywall)

and

Sensors that monitor heart rates and body temperature have now been installed in bras to help wearers know when they in the company of a potential true love. The sensors send signals to smartphones with special analytical software, and if the wearer’s natural body signals are determined by the software to be “right,” the bra unsnaps! (Guardian Weekly)

These are just two of the many developments occurring in the growing world of inexpensive sensors. The diaper invention holds the promise of alerting young parents, who may be engrossed in a video game, Pinterest, email responses or catching up with their long lost kindergarten friend on Facebook. While the small cost of the sensor is appealing, a no-cost crying baby may still be the best indicator of a wet diaper – and also offer the opportunity of bonding between baby and caregiver.

If we were to start listing other places where sensors could enhance the “undergarment market,” this blog could quickly become R-rated. But we will say that these are yet more examples of interpersonal decisions being turned over to technology.

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The following are some recent facts and events that begin to illustrate the new reality of housing- that the majority of new construction will be multi-family, smaller and in cities.

New American Lifestyles

• There are two million  more adults ages 18-34 living under their parents roof last year than four years ago.
• 80 percent of units now have one bedroom. In the past, 60 percent had two bedrooms
• New units are as small as 500 square feet in Houston, even smaller in San Francisco and New York City.
• Married couples with children make up under one in four households today
• Between 2010 and 2011, 86.5 percent of small metro areas saw an increase in the number of people living in the city.
• Cities in the smallest metro areas (150,000-250,000 people) saw the largest increase in people within their boundaries.
• Cities in small metro areas grew in population by 0.89 percent outpacing suburb growth by 0.67 percent.
• Small metro cities are seeing more growth then big cities. 55 percent of cities in small metro areas grew at a faster rate than their suburban counterparts between 2010 and 2011. 51 percent of cities in large metro areas added population at a greater rate than their suburbs.
• The nation added more than 2 million households in the 12 months that ended March 31 about triple the average for the previous four years. Most of the gains came from baby boomers. – divorce?
• The number of people ages 25-29 who moved across state lines reached its highest level in 13 years

Multifamily housing

• Multifamily construction is two-thirds of the way back to prerecession peak.
• New apartment complexes are going up at fastest rate since July 2008
• In Houston, from January to September, construction permits for multifamily housing increased by more than 70 percent over the year earlier.

Single family housing

• Single fam construction is one-third back to peak
• Houston permits for single family increased 25 percent from Jan to Sept.

Economy and General Housing

• Net worth increase by $1.7 trillion in Q3
• Households got $301 billion bump in value of real estate assets
• Case-Schiller 20 home index has risen month over month for 6 months with four consecutive monthly year over year gains.
• Jobless rate of those ages 25-34 dropped from 9 percent at start of the year to 7.9 in November

• There have been 559,000 home seizures in 2012. The Fed Reserve Bank of NY had estimated as many as 1.8 million properties would be taken back this year.   Foreclosures are at a five year low.
• Foreclosures and short sales made up 24 percent of October sales. The same level as September but down 28 percent from a year earlier.
• There were 2.14 million existing homes for sale in October, down 1.4 percent from September. That translates to a 5.4 month supply at the current sales rate, the lowest level since February 2006.
• The number of residential properties for sale in the U.S. shrank to the lowest level in a decade. Prices have appreciated in the fastest pace since 2005.
• Median price of an existing home sold in October jumped 11 percent from a year earlier, steepest annual increase since November 2005.
• Almost a quarter of all US homeowners with a mortgage are underwater
• Fed reserve is buying $40 billion in mortgages every month which is keeping rates low.

General home building

• Pace of home building rose to its highest level in more than four years in October. U.S. builders increased their spending on construction projects in October by the largest amount in 5 months. Level of spending is still considered low.
• Builder confidence in the housing market rose for the 8th straight month in December to its highest point in more than six years. Sentiment reading of 47, means more builders have a negative outlook than a positive one

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http://www.sfgate.com/science/article/Warmer-winters-chill-ski-industry-4101277.php

We have written about the ways in which climate change and extreme weather impact food, water, energy and infrastructure, but there will be many other areas of impact as well, in this case labor markets and potentially winter-sports equipment and ski resorts.

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Most importantly, the Santa River which receives water from the glaciers, has passed its “peak water,” after which the amount of discharge from the glaciers drops off sharply.

The back story for the Peruvian experience is that agriculture was built up in recent years taking advantage of the glacial flow – just as the flow started to diminish.

This sets up a conflict for various users of the water, which is likely to be duplicated in many parts of the world so affected. The military has identified this conflict as central to future military conflict. At the very least, more efficient water-use will be a necessity for many years.

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According to Roy Baumeister and John Tierney, we should make decisions when we aren’t fatigued.

In their 2011 book, Willpower: The Greatest Human Strength, Baumeister, a social psychologist, and Tierney, a science writer, describe the results of a study of parole boards at an Israeli prison.  The board approved prisoner paroles 70 percent of the time in the morning, but only 10 percent of the time in the afternoon.

Even controlling for other factors which helped create the results (such as different types of prisoners getting different time slots, etc.), what caused the discrepancy?

“The mental work of ruling on case after case, whatever the individual merits, wore them down,” they write.

The researchers maintain that factors such as differing energy or glucose levels (which vary by time of day)  impact our willingness and ability to engage in mental decision making.

With this in mind, many professions (legal, corporate, investment, medical) should decide to skew work time and shift decision tasks to earlier in the day.

Or maybe we should just bring back siestas.

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Not long after those arrests in Jordan, the Indonesian counterterrorism police arrested 11 people accused of planning terrorist attacks on several high-profile targets including the American Embassy in Jakarta.  The police claim that those arrested were part of a relatively new group, the Sunni Movement for Indonesian Society, also known as Hasmi.  Indonesian police uncovered a completed bomb, explosive materials and bomb-making manuals.  An Indonesian spokesman called the threat part of a “new generation” of terrorist organizations that has splintered off from al-Qaida’s Southeast Asian affiliate, Jemaah Islamiyah.

The Jordan and Indonesian arrests come about six weeks after the attacks on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, and at least according to the police reports in Jordan and Indonesia, included plots to attack U.S. Embassy’s and diplomats.

Are these isolated, coincidental events, or evidence of a network of next-generation terrorists loosely working together to accomplish a common goal?

Twelve years after we wrote our September 2000 Briefing entitled “Bombs and Networks,” intelligence services are still trying to figure that out.

http://www.inferentialfocus.com/media/files/briefings/if2124.pdf

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We are monitoring the development of a new grand narrative for society, one that so far seems to go against a basic element of the now discredited former grand narrative: namely, “bigger is better,” in home size, drink size and so on. The KFC commercial below shows that the adverising world is catching on to the fact that the “bigger” mantra of the old grand narrative is losing appeal. Meanwhile, we are watching closely to keep track of the next grand narrative as it develops.

http://youtu.be/v5PXqnUeDuE

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The Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus pledged that, by 2020, the Navy would reduce its dependence on fossil fuels by half. As part of that effort, over the next few years, the Navy will invest $170 million in private-sector companies that are building advanced biofuel refineries and will receive equity in return.  The Department of Energy and the Department of Agriculture are contributing another $170 million each.

This will also help advance a Congressional bill called the Federal Renewable Standard, passed in 2005, which requires the country to use 21 billion gallons of advanced biofuels by 2020.  Two billion were produced this year.

The investing Departments are hoping to repeat the successes of prior venture-capital like approaches to building new technologies such as microchips, radar and GPS.  In those instances, prices eventually came down enough for those products to take off in the private sector. As the Navy had a fuel bill of $4.7 billion last year, the biofuel industry may be poised for a meteoric rise.

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Another attack which made headlines occurred August 5 when Wade Michael Page murdered six congregants and wounded a police officer at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin.   Since Page, who had a 9/11 tattoo, was killed during the attack, it will never be known if the violence was a result of him believing that the Sikh temple was a house of Muslim worship.  However, in addition to the attack in Wisconsin, there have been numerous recent attacks against Muslims that haven’t generated front-page news.  Consider:

–         On August 4, teenagers pelted a mosque in Hayward (CA) with fruit.

–         On August 5, a man vandalized a mosque in North Smithfield (RI).

–         On August 6, a mosque in Joplin (MO) was burned to the ground.

–         On August 7, two women threw pieces of pork at the site of a proposed Islamic center in Ontario (CA).

–         On August 10, a man allegedly shot a pellet rifle at a mosque near Chicago.

–         On August 12, attackers fired paintball guns at a mosque in Oklahoma City.

–         On August 12, a homemade bomb filled with acid was thrown at an Islamic school in Lombard (Ill).

–         On August 15, assailants threw a Molotov cocktail at the home of a Muslim family in Panama City (FL).

While the shootings in Aurora and New York City seem to be related to mental instability and the economic times, what can be made of these incidents, spread across 6 states, in less than two weeks, more than a decade after the September 11 attacks?

In 2000, we wrote a Briefing entitled, “Bombs and Networks” in which we noted a rash of terrorist attacks spread across the globe. Our intelligence suggested that a network of terrorists were working together and sharing information with a common goal.   While we don’t have enough information now to infer the same thing, it does raise several questions:   Are certain Americans feeling comfortable venting their anger at people who think differently than they.  Are more and more angry Americans reading similar online material that might be preaching such hatred.  Or are some of these attacks part of a coordinated set of actions.  If the answer lies with either of the first two questions, then we can expect more of such attacks in the months ahead, but if the answer is with the third question, then even bigger things could be on the horizon.

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–         A wind farm in Oregon

–         A solar plant 130 miles outside of San Francisco

–         A solar plant northeast of Los Angeles

–         A 500-megawatt wind project in a remote part of Montana

These lawsuits haven’t been filed by coal, gas or oil companies, but rather by numerous environmental groups.  A recent U.S. Chamber of Commerce report, “Project No Project” found 140 renewable projects that have been delayed or killed by environmental groups.  Additionally, an analysis in the journal “Policy Review” found that every one of the nearly two dozen solar, wind and geothermal projects under review in the Southwest desert faces “varying degrees of opposition from environmental groups.”  The common reason for the lawsuits –  endangered animals.

The environmental groups are definitely anti-coal and most are anti-gas.  They are pro-solar and pro-wind, but yet they are so concerned with endangered animals (not judging) that they choose to shut down these potential alternative sources.

With the abundance of U.S. gas keeping prices for that energy source low, and Chinese subsidies making profitability a challenge for U.S. solar and wind companies, what will become of the U.S. clean energy industry if it can’t even get the environmental groups on the same page?

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