Category Archives: Sustainabilty

Natural Environment, Well-Being, Compliance, Beyond Compliance, Equilibrium, Beyond Equilibrium

Batteries

CREDIT: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/16/business/energy-environment/electric-car-batteries-investment.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

Key points:

Demand for batteries will explode.

Global race to dominate the field.

China currently dominate.

Europe (EU) investing heavily.

The mother lode: a commercial-grade solid state battery, replacing liquid.

Needed: cheaper, longer-lasting.

Article below:

Batteries

Feb. 16, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ET

As automakers like General MotorsVolkswagen and Ford Motor make bold promises about transitioning to an electrified, emission-free future, one thing is becoming obvious: They will need a lot of batteries.

Demand for this indispensable component already outstrips supply, prompting a global gold rush that has investors, established companies and start-ups racing to develop the technology and build the factories needed to churn out millions of electric cars.

Long considered one of the least interesting car components, batteries may now be one of the most exciting parts of the auto industry. Car manufacturing hasn’t fundamentally changed in 50 years and is barely profitable, but the battery industry is still ripe for innovation. Technology is evolving at a pace that is reminiscent of the early days of personal computers, mobile phones or even automobiles and an influx of capital has the potential to mint the next Steve Jobs or Henry Ford.

Wood Mackenzie, an energy research and consulting firm, estimates that electric vehicles will make up about 18 percent of new car sales by 2030. That would increase the demand for batteries by about eight times as much as factories can currently produce. And that is a conservative estimate. Some analysts expect electric vehicle sales to grow much faster.

Carmakers are engaged in an intense race to acquire the chemical recipe that will deliver the most energy at the lowest price and in the smallest package. G.M.’s announcement last month that it would go all electric by 2035was widely considered a landmark moment by policymakers and environmentalists. But to many people in the battery industry, the company was stating the obvious.

“This was the last in a wave of big announcements that very clearly signaled that electric vehicles are here,” said Venkat Viswanathan, an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University who researches battery technology.

Battery manufacturing is dominated by companies like Tesla, Panasonic, LG Chem, BYD China and SK Innovation — nearly all of them based in China, Japan or South Korea. But there are also many new players getting into the game. And investors, sensing the vast profits at stake, are hurling money at start-ups that they believe are close to breakthroughs.

“I think we’re in the infancy stage,” said Andy Palmer, the former chief executive of Aston Martin and now the nonexecutive vice chairman of InoBat Auto, a battery start-up. “There is more money than there are ideas.”

QuantumScape, a Silicon Valley start-up whose investors include Volkswagen and Bill Gates, is working on a technology that could make batteries cheaper, more reliable and quicker to recharge. But it has no substantial sales and it could fail to produce and sell batteries. Yet, stock market investors consider the company to be more valuable than the French carmaker.

China and the European Union are injecting government funds into battery technology. China sees batteries as crucial to its ambition to dominate the electric vehicle industry. In response, the Chinese government helped Contemporary Amperex Technology, which is partly state-owned, become one of the world’s biggest battery suppliers seemingly overnight.

The European Union is subsidizing battery production to avoid becoming dependent on Asian suppliers and to preserve auto industry jobs. Last month, the European Commission, the bloc’s administrative arm, announced a 2.9 billion euro, or $3.5 billion, fund to support battery manufacturing and research. That was on top of the more than €60 billion that European governments and automakers had already committed to electric vehicles and batteries, according to the consulting firm Accenture. Some of the government money will go to Tesla as a reward for the company’s decision to build a factory near Berlin.

The United States is also expected to promote the industry in accordance with President Biden’s focus on climate change and his embrace of electric cars. In a campaign ad last year, Mr. Biden, who owns a 1967 Chevrolet Corvette, said he was looking forward to driving an electric version of the sports car if G.M. decides to make one.

Several battery factories are in the planning or construction phase in the United States, including a factory G.M. is building in Ohio with LG, but analysts said federal incentives for electric car and battery production would be crucial to creating a thriving industry in the United States. So will technological advances by government-funded researchers and domestic companies like QuantumScape and Tesla, which last fall outlined its plans to lower the cost and improve the performance of batteries.

“There’s no secret that China strongly promotes manufacturing and new development,” said Margaret Mann, a group manager in the Center for Integrated Mobility Sciences at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, a unit of the U.S. Energy Department. “I am not pessimistic,” she said of the United States’ ability to gain ground in battery production. “But I don’t think all of the problems have been solved yet.”

Entrepreneurs working in this area said these were early days and U.S. companies could still leapfrog the Asian producers that dominate the industry.

“Today’s batteries are not competitive,” said Jagdeep Singh, chief executive of QuantumScape, which is based in San Jose, Calif. “Batteries have enormous potential and are critical for a renewable energy economy, but they have to get better.”

For the most part, all of the money pouring into battery technology is good news. It puts capitalism to work on solving a global problem. But this reordering of the auto industry will also claim some victims, like the companies that build parts for internal combustion engine cars and trucks, or automakers and investors that bet on the wrong technology.

“Battery innovations are not overnight,” said Venkat Srinivasan, director of the Argonne National Laboratory’s Collaborative Center for Energy Storage Science. “It can take you many years. All sorts of things can happen.”

Most experts are certain that demand for batteries will empower China, which refines most of the metals used in batteries and produces more than 70 percent of all battery cells. And China’s grip on battery production will slip only marginally during the next decade despite ambitious plans to expand production in Europe and the United States, according to projections by Roland Berger, a German management consulting firm.

Battery production has “deep geopolitical ramifications,” said Tom Einar Jensen, the chief executive of Freyr, which is building a battery factory in northern Norway to take advantage of the region’s abundant wind and hydropower. “The European auto industry doesn’t want to rely too much on imports from Asia in general and China in particular,” he added.

Freyr plans to raise $850 million as part of a proposed merger with Alussa Energy Acquisition Corporation, a shell company that sold shares before it had any assets. The deal, announced in January, would give Freyr a listing on the New York Stock Exchange. The company plans to make batteries using technology developed by 24M Technologies in Cambridge, Mass.

The first priority for the industry is to make batteries cheaper. Electric car batteries for a midsize vehicle cost about $15,000, or roughly double the price they need to be for electric cars to achieve mass acceptance, Mr. Srinivasan said.

Those savings can be achieved by making dozens of small improvements — like producing batteries close to car factories to avoid shipping costs — and by reducing waste, according to Roland Berger. About 10 percent of the materials that go into making a battery are wasted because of inefficient production methods.

But, in a recent study, Roland Berger also warned that growing demand could push up prices for raw materials like lithium, cobalt and nickel and cancel out some of those efficiency gains. The auto industry is competing for batteries with electric utilities and other energy companies that need them to store intermittent wind and solar power, further driving up demand.

“We are getting rumbles there may be a supply crunch this year,” said Jason Burwen, interim chief executive for the United States Energy Storage Association.

An entire genre of companies has sprung up to replace expensive minerals used in batteries with materials that are cheaper and more common. OneD Material, based in San Jose, Calif., makes a substance that looks like used coffee grounds for use in anodes, the electrode through which power leaves batteries when a vehicle is underway. The material is made from silicon, which is abundant and inexpensive, to reduce the need for graphite, which is scarcer and more expensive.

Longer term, the industry holy grail is solid state batteries, which will replace the liquid lithium solution at the core of most batteries with solid layers of a lithium compound. Solid state batteries would be more stable and less prone to overheating, allowing faster charging times. They would also weigh less.

Toyota Motor and other companies have invested heavily in the technology, and have already succeeded in building some solid state batteries. The hard part is mass producing them at a reasonable cost. Much of the excitement around QuantumScape stems from the company’s assertion that it has found a material that solves one of the main impediments to mass production of solid state batteries, namely their tendency to short circuit if there are any imperfections.

Still, most people in the industry don’t expect solid state batteries to be widely available until around 2030. Mass producing batteries is “the hardest thing in the world,” Elon Musk, Tesla’s chief executive, said on a recent conference call with analysts. “Prototypes are easy. Scaling production is very hard.”

One thing is certain: It’s a great time to have a degree in electrochemistry. Those who understand the properties of lithium, nickel, cobalt and other materials are to batteries what software coders are to computers. Jakub Reiter, for example, has been fascinated with battery chemistry since he was a teenager growing up in the 1990s in Prague, long before that seemed like a hot career choice.

Mr. Reiter was doing graduate research in Germany in 2011 when a headhunter recruited him to work at BMW, which wanted to understand the underlying science of batteries. Last year, InoBat poached him to help set up a factory in Slovakia, where Volkswagen, Kia, Peugeot and Jaguar Land Rover produce cars.

Mr. Reiter is now head of science at InoBat, whose technology allows customers to quickly develop batteries for different uses, like a low-cost battery for a commuter car or a high-performance version for a roadster.

“Twenty years ago, nobody cared much about batteries,” Mr. Reiter said. Now, he said, there is intense competition and “it’s a big fight.”

The Electric Car Race

Remaking the auto industry

G.M. Announcement Shakes Up U.S. Automakers’ Transition to Electric Cars

Jan. 29, 2021

G.M.’s Electric Car Push Could Put China in the Driver’s Seat

Jan. 29, 2021

California Is Trying to Jump-Start the Hydrogen Economy

Nov. 11, 2020

The Age of Electric Cars Is Dawning Ahead of Schedule

Sept. 20, 2020

Jack Ewing writes about business, banking, economics and monetary policy from Frankfurt, and contributes to breaking news coverage. Previously he worked for a decade at BusinessWeek magazine in Frankfurt, where he was European regional editor. @JackEwingNYT • Facebook

Ivan Penn is a Los Angeles-based reporter covering alternative energy. Before coming to The Times in 2018 he covered utility and energy issues at The Tampa Bay Times and The Los Angeles Times. @ivanlpenn

Climate Change Language

We Need A Better Language for Climate Change – that Acts as a Call to Action

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Below is as essay that makes the case for a new six-box classification system for global climate change – two columns and three rows. The core idea here is to move climate change out of a subject for the editorial page and into a subject for daily new – much like how storms, earthquakes and epidemics are covered. We want a language that serves as a “call-to-action”.

The news would inform the world about climate-change related occurrences that have impacts that are “major”, “disaster”, or “global disaster”, and that are either “incidents” (one-time) or “recurring”.

I worked this out with Karen . I am the scribe. Obviously, this is DRAFT 1.

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Climate Change Language

CREDIT: Karen Flanders-Reid
CREDIT: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/08/opinion/environment/california-wildfires-trump-zinke-climate-change.html

Karen and I read today’s NYT article about California wildfires, and found ourselves musing – is the language of climate change right? Why is a “wildfire” just an isolated incident? Why isn’t it part of a larger wildfire classification system (“BREAKING NEWS: THE CALIFORNIA WILDFIRE HAS JUST BEEN RECLASSIFIED AS CATEGORY V.”?

We went on to ask: if climate change is the critical issue of our day, why Why isn’t the wildfire in California an climate change incident – part of a larger climate change classification system?

Why do the NYT editorial writers have to scream – everything is related to climate change!!!! After all, news breaks when a Hurricane is re-classified: “BREAKING NEWS: THE TROPICAL STORM OVER CUBA HAS JUST BEEN RE-CLASSIFIED BY THE WEATHER SERVICE AS A HURRICANE.”

Why doesn’t climate change have its own global classification system? How do we move from the editorial opinion desk to the news desk? How do we move from “The science is being ignored.” To “BREAKING NEWS: THE WILDFIRES IN CALIFORNIA HAVE JUST BEEN RECLASSIFIED BY THE WEATHER SERVICE FROM A CLIMATE-RELATED INCIDENT (CRI) TO A CLIMATE-RELATED DISASTER (CRD).”

EXAMPLES OF POWERFUL GLOBAL CLASSIFICATION SYSTEMS

To identify a powerful classification system, and the new language it implies, it first would be useful to identify the other global classification systems that exist – especially those with imply a call to action.

There are at least four:

Storms; Classified by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), using the Saffir–Simpson scale:

Tropical Depression
Tropical Storm
Hurricane/Cyclone Categories 1-5

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximum_sustained_wind

Earthquakes: Classified by the US Geological Service, using the Richter Scale:
Moderate (above 8)
Strong (7-7.9)
Major (6-6.9)
Great (5-5.9)

Infectious Disease; Classified by the global centers for disease control, the classes are:

Outbreak (more incident than expected)
Epidemic (spreads rapidly to many people)
Pandemic (spreads rapidly to many people globally)

Source: https://www.webmd.com/cold-and-flu/what-are-epidemics-pandemics-outbreaks#1

A NEW GLOBAL CLASSIFICATION SYSTEM FOR CLIMATE CHANGE

To Begin

We recommend s simple structure, with easily understood terms, that evolves over time:

Starts with a few terms, and adds terms over time.
Begins classifying major occurrences only, and evolves to classify most occurrences.
Begins classifying evidence-based occurrences only (where science is conclusive that the occurrence is climate-change-related) and evolves as science becomes increasingly conclusive.

Initial Terms

“Occurrence” – a natural phenomena that occurs somewhere

“Climate-Change-Related” (CR) – a shorthand for saying that the preponderance of science indicates that a given occurrence is a contributor to or the result of climate change.

“Incident” (I) – an episodic occurrence (with a beginning, middle, and end)
“Recurring” (R) – an on-going occurrence (no end in sight)

“Major” (M) – an occurrence with sufficient size to merit being classified.
“Disaster” (D) – an occurrence, with major impacts
“Global Disaster” (G) – an occurrence with major global impacts

Initial Classification System:

Climate-related Occurrences shall be identified.

Once identified, they shall be classified in one of six classes:

Either “incidents” or “recurring”.
Either “major”, “disaster”, or “global disaster”

“Climate-Change-Related Event” (CRE) – any occurrence that is deemed to be a contributor to climate-change.

“Climate-Change-Related Outcome” (CRO) – any occurrence that is deemed to be the result of to climate-change.

All major climate-change-related occurrences would be classified as follows:

CR Incident (CRE-I): An episodic event, with a beginning, a middle, and an end.
CR Disaster (CRE-D): An episodic event, with global impacts

The Weather Service would be tasked with implementation, and aligning with the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and other agencies around the world.

Homeostasis

One of the smartest guys in the room, Antonio Damasio, give his views about neuroscience and its relationship to pain, pleasure, and feelings. He points out that they all play a giant role in one of life’s most important concepts: homeostasis.

CREDIT: http://nautil.us/issue/56/perspective/antonio-damasio-tells-us-why-pain-is-necessary

Antonio Damasio Tells Us Why Pain Is Necessary
The neuroscientist explains why feelings evolved.

BY KEVIN BERGER
JANUARY 18, 2018

Following Oliver Sacks, Antonio Damasio may be the neuroscientist whose popular books have done the most to inform readers about the biological machinery in our heads, how it generates thoughts and emotions, creates a self to cling to, and a sense of transcendence to escape by. But since he published Descartes’ Error in 1994, Damasio has been concerned that a central thesis in his books, that brains don’t define us, has been muted by research that states how much they do. To Damasio’s dismay, the view of the human brain as a computer, the command center of the body, has become lodged in popular culture.

In his new book, The Strange Order of Things, Damasio, a professor of neuroscience and the director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California, mounts his boldest argument yet for the egalitarian role of the brain. In “Why Your Biology Runs on Feelings,” another article in this chapter of Nautilus, drawn from his new book, Damasio tells us “mind and brain influence the body proper just as much as the body proper can influence the brain and the mind. They are merely two aspects of the very same being.”

BEYOND SCIENCE: Antonio Damasio, director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at USC, sings the glories of the arts in his new book, The Strange Order of Things: “The sciences alone cannot illuminate the entirety of human experience without the light that comes from art and humanities.”

The Strange Order of Things offers a sharp and uncommon focus on feelings, on how their biological evolution fueled our prosperity as a species, spurred science and medicine, religion and art. “When I look back on Descartes’ Error, it was completely timid compared to what I’m saying now,” Damasio says. He knows his new book may rile believers in the brain as emperor of all. “I was entirely open with my ideas,” he says. “If people don’t like it, they don’t like it. They can criticize it, of course, which is fair, but I want to tell them, because it’s so interesting, this is why you have feelings.”
In this interview with Nautilus, Damasio, in high spirits, explains why feelings deserve a starring role in human culture, what the real problem with consciousness studies are, and why Shakespeare is the finest cognitive scientist of them all.

One thing I like about The Strange Order of Things is it counters the idea that we are just our brains.

Oh, that idea is absolutely wrong.

Not long ago I was watching a PBS series on the brain, in which host and neurologist David Eagleman, referring to our brain, declares, “What we feel, what matters to us, our beliefs and our hopes, everything we are happens in here.”

That’s not the whole story. Of course, we couldn’t have minds with all of their enormous complexity without nervous systems. That goes without saying. But minds are not the result of nervous systems alone. The statement you quote reminds me of Francis Crick, someone whom I admired immensely and was a great friend. Francis was quite opposed to my views on this issue. We would have huge discussions because he was the one who said that everything you are, your thoughts, your feelings, your mental this and that, are nothing but your neurons. This is a big mistake, in my view, because we are mentally and behaviorally far more than our neurons. We cannot have feelings arising from neurons alone. The nervous systems are in constant interaction and cooperation with the rest of the organism. The reason why nervous systems exist in the first place is to assist the rest of the organism. That fact is constantly missed.

The concept of “homeostasis” is critical in your new book. What is homeostasis?

It’s the fundamental property of life that governs everything that living cells do, whether they’re living cells alone, or living cells as part of a tissue or an organ, or a complex system such as ourselves. Most of the time, when people hear the word homeostasis, they think of balance, they think of equilibrium. That is incorrect because if we ever were in “equilibrium,” we would be dead. Thermodynamically, equilibrium means zero thermal differences and death. Equilibrium is the last thing that nature aims for.

The importance of feeling is that it makes you critically aware of what you are doing in moral terms.

What we must have is efficient functioning of a variety of components of an organism. We procure energy so that the organism can be perpetuated, but then we do something very important and almost always missed, which is hoard energy. We need to maintain positive energy balances, something that goes beyond what we need right now because that’s what ensures the future. What’s so beautiful about homeostasis is that it’s not just about sustaining life at the moment, but about having a sort of guarantee that it will continue into the future. Without those positive energy balances, we court death.

What’s a good example of homeostasis?

If you are at the edge of your energy reserves and you’re sick with the flu, you can easily tip over and die. That’s one of the reasons why there’s fat accumulation in our bodies. We need to maintain the possibility of meeting the extra needs that come from stress, in the broad sense of the term. I poetically describe this as a desire for permanence, but it’s not just poetic. I believe it’s reality.

You write homeostasis is maintained in complex creatures like us through a constant interplay of pleasure and pain. Are you giving a biological basis to Freud’s pleasure principle—life is governed by a drive for pleasure and avoidance of pain?

Yes, to a great extent. What’s so interesting is that for most of the existence of life on earth, all organisms have had this effective, automated machinery that operates for the purpose of maintenance and continuation of life. I like to call the organisms that only have that form of regulation, “living automata.” They can fight. They can cooperate. They can segregate. But there’s no evidence that they know that they’re doing so. There’s no evidence of anything we might call a mind. Obviously we have more than automatic regulation. We can control regulation in part, if we wish to. How did that come about?
Very late in the game of life there’s the appearance of nervous systems. Now you have the possibility of mapping the inside and outside world. When you map the inside world, guess what you get? You get feelings. Of necessity, the machinery of life is either in a state of reasonable efficiency or in a state of inefficiency, which is most often the case. Organisms with nervous systems can image these states. And when you start having imagery, you start having minds. Now you begin to have the possibility of responding in a way that you could call “knowledgeable.” That happens when organisms make images. A bad internal state would have been imaged as the first pains, the first malaises, the first sufferings. Now the organism has the possibility of knowingly avoiding whatever caused the pain or prefer a place or a thing or another animal that causes the opposite of that, which is well-being and pleasure.

Why would feelings have evolved?

Feelings triumphed in evolution because they were so helpful to the organisms that first had them. It’s important to understand that nervous systems serve the organism and not the other way around. We do not have brains controlling the entire operation. Brains adjust controls. They are the servants of a living organism. Brains triumphed because they provided something useful: coordination. Once organisms got to the point of being so complex that they had an endocrine system, immune system, circulation, and central metabolism, they needed a device to coordinate all that activity. They needed to have something that would simultaneously act on point A and point Z, across the entire organism, so that the parts would not be working at cross purposes. That’s what nervous systems first achieve: making things run smoothly.

Now, in the process of doing that, over millions of years, we have developed nervous systems that do plenty of other things that do not necessarily result in coordination of the organism’s interior, but happen to be very good at coordinating the internal world in relation to the outside world. This is what the higher reaches of our nervous system, namely the cerebral cortex, does. It gives us the possibilities of perceiving, of memorizing, of reasoning over the knowledge that we memorize, of manipulating all of that and even translating it into language. That is all very beautiful, and it is also homeostatic, in the sense that all of it is convenient to maintain life. It if were not, it would just have been discarded by evolution.

How does your thesis square with the hard problem of consciousness, how the physical tissue in our heads produces immaterial sensations?

Some philosophers of mind will say, “Well, we face this gigantic problem. How does consciousness emerge out of these nerve cells?” Well, it doesn’t. You’re not dealing with the brain alone. You have to think in terms of the whole organism. And you have to think in evolutionary terms.

The critical problem of consciousness is subjectivity. You need to have a “subject.” You can call it an I or a self. Not only are you aware right now that you are listening to my words, which are in the panorama of your consciousness, but you are aware of being alive, you realize that you’re there, you’re ticking. We are so distracted by what is going on around us that we forget sometimes that we are, A-R-E in capitals. But actually you are watching what you are, and so you need to have a mechanism in the brain that allows you to fabricate that part of the mind that is the watcher.
You do that with a number of devices that have to do, for example, with mapping the movements of your eyes, the position of your head, and the musculature of your body. This allows you to literally construct images of yourself making images. And you also have a layer of consciousness that is made by your perception of the outside world; and another layer that is made of appreciating the feelings that are being generated inside of you. Once you have this stack of processes, you have a fighting chance of creating consciousness.

Why do you object to comparing the brain to a computer?

In the early days of neuroscience, one of our mentors was Warren McCulloch. He was a gigantic figure of neuroscience, one of the originators of what is today computational neuroscience. When you go back to the ’40s and ’50s, you find this amazing discovery that neurons can be either active or inactive, in a way that can be described mathematically as zeroes and ones. Combine that with Alan Turing and you get this idea that the brain is like a computer and that it produces minds using that same simple method.

Religions have been one of the great causes of violence throughout history. But you can’t blame Christ for it.

That has been a very useful idea. And true enough, it explains a good part of the complex operations, that our brains produce such as language. Those operations require a lot of precision and are being carried out by cerebral cortex, with enormous detail, and probably in a basic computational mode. All the great successes of artificial intelligence used this idea and have been concerned with high-level reasoning. That is why A.I. has been so successful with games such as chess or Go. They use large memories and powerful reasoning.

Are you saying neural codes or algorithms don’t blend with living systems?

Well, they match very well with things that are high on the scale of the mental operations and behaviors, such as those we require for our conversation. But they don’t match well with the basic systems that organize life, that regulate, for example, the degree of mental energy and excitation or with how you emote and feel. The reason is that the operations of the nervous system responsible for such regulation relies less on synaptic signaling, the one that can be described in terms of zeroes and ones, and far more on non-synaptic messaging, which lends itself less to a rigid all or none operation.
Perhaps more importantly, computers are machines invented by us, made of durable materials. None of those materials has the vulnerability of the cells in our body, all of which are at risk of defective homeostasis, disease, and death. In fact, computers lack most of the characteristics that are key to a living system. A living system is maintained in operation, against all odds, thanks to a complicated mechanism that can fall apart as a result of minimal amounts of malfunction. We are extremely vulnerable creatures. People often forget that. Which is one of the reasons why our culture, or Western cultures in general, are a bit too calm and complacent about the threats to our lives. I think we are becoming less sensitive to the idea that life is what dictates what we should do or not do with ourselves and with others.

What is love for?

To protect, to cause flourishing, to give and receive pleasure, to procreate, to soothe. Endless great uses, as you can see.

How do emotions such as anger or sadness serve homeostasis?

At individual levels, both anger and sadness are protective. Anger lets your adversary know that you mean business and that there may be costs to attacking you. These days anger is an expression of sociopolitical conflicts. It is overused and has largely become ineffectual. Sadness is a prelude to mental hibernation. It lets you retreat and lick your wounds. It lets you plan a strategy of response to the cause of the wounds.

You say feelings spurred the creation of cultures. How so?

Before I started The Strange Order of Things, I was asking friends and colleagues how they thought cultures had begun. Invariably what people said was, “Oh, we’re so smart. We’re so intellectually powerful. We have all this reasoning ability. On top of it all, we have language—and there you are.” To which I say, “Fine, that’s true. How would you invent anything if you were stupid?” You would not. But the issue is to recognize the motive behind what you do. Why is it that you did it in the first place? Why did Moses come down from the mountain with Ten Commandments? Well, the Ten Commandments are representative of homeostasis because they tell you not to kill, not to steal, not to lie, not to do a lot of bad things. It sounds trivial but it’s not. We fail to think about motivation and so we do not factor it into the process of invention. We do not factor in the motives behind science or technology or governance or religion.

How does consciousness emerge out of nerve cells? Well, it doesn’t. You’re not dealing with the brain alone.

And there’s one more thing: The importance of feeling is that it makes you critically aware of what you are doing in moral terms. It forces you to look back and realize that what people were doing historically, at the outset, at the moment of invention of a cultural instrument or a cultural practice, was an attempt to reduce the amount of suffering and to maximize the amount of wellbeing not only for the inventor, but for the community around them. One person alone can invent a painting or a musical composition, but it is not meant for that person alone. And you do not invent a moral system or a government system alone or for yourself alone. It requires a society, a community.

The assertion that intellect is governed by feelings can sound New Age-y. It seems to undermine the powers of reason. How should we understand reason if it’s always motivated by subjective feelings?

Subjective simply means that it has a personal point of view, that it pertains to the self. It is compatible with “objective” facts and with truth. It is not about relativism. The fact that feelings motivate the use of knowledge and reason do not make the knowledge and the reason any less truthful or valid. Feelings are simply a call to action.

If humans formed societies and cultures to avoid suffering and pain, why do we have violence and wars?

Your question is very important. Take developments of political systems. On the face of it, when you look at Marxist ideas, you say, “This is obviously homeostatic.” What Marx and others were trying to do in the 19th century is confront and modify a social arrangement that was not equitable, that had some people suffering too much and some profiting too much. So having a system that produced equality made a lot of sense. In a way that is something that biological systems have been trying to do, quite naturally, for a long time. And when the natural systems do not succeed at improved regulation, guess what? They are weeded out by evolution because they promote illness.
Biological evolution, through genetic selection, eliminates those mechanisms. At the cultural level something comparable occurs. Seen in retrospect, Marxism as applied in Russia resulted in one of the worst tragedies of humankind. But Russian communism was ultimately weeded out by cultural selection. It took around 70 years to do it, but cultural selection did operate in a homeostatic way. It led to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet empire. It was a homeostatic correction achieved by social means.
The same reasoning applies to religions. For example, we can claim that religions have been one of the great causes of violence throughout history. But you certainly can’t blame Christ for that violence. He preached compassion, and the pardoning of enemies, and love. It does not follow that good recommendations can be implemented correctly and always produce good results. These facts in no way deny the homeostatic intent of religions.

You write, “The increasing knowledge of biology from molecules to systems reinforces the humanist project.” How so?

This knowledge gives us a broader picture of who we are and where we are in the history of life on earth. We had modest beginnings, and we have incorporated an incredible amount of living wisdom that comes from as far down as bacteria. There are characteristics of our personal and cultural behavior that can be found in single-cell organisms or in social insects. They clearly do not have the kind of highly developed brains that we have. In some cases, they don’t have any brain at all. But by analyzing this strange order of developments we are confronted with the spectacle of life processes that are complex and rich in spite of their apparent modesty, so complex and rich that they can deliver the high level of behaviors that we normally, quite pretentiously, attribute only to our great human smarts. We should be far more humble. That’s one of my main messages. In general, connecting cultures to the life process makes apparent a link that we have ignored for far too long.


What would you be if you weren’t a scientist?

When I was an adolescent, I often thought that I might become a philosopher or perhaps a playwright or filmmaker. That’s because I so admired what philosophers and storytellers had found about the human mind. Today when people ask me, “Who’s your most admired cognitive scientist?” I say Shakespeare. He knew it all and knew it with enormous precision. He didn’t have the nice fMRI scanner and electrophysiology techniques we have in our Institute. But he knew human beings. Watch a good performance of Hamlet, King Lear, or Othello. All of our psychology is there, richly analyzed, ready for us to experience and appreciate.

Tribute to Global Progress

Debbie Downers: attention!

The point of this post: global progress on the fronts that really count has been amazing.

There are many sources. But my favorite is Nick Kristof’s column “Why 2017 Was the Best Year in Human History”. The column was the most emailed column of the week. I now see why. It is reprinted below.

“The most important thing happening right now is not a Trump tweet, but children’s lives saved and major gains in health, education and human welfare.”

Let me step back for a minute.

Fareed Zacharia, in his 2008 book The Post-American World, first raised my awareness about global progress. He began to get my head screwed on correctly.

Don’t get me wrong. I have lived in this fishbowl of global progress my entire life. I have been keenly aware of its major events, such as:

The Industrial Revolution
The Triumph of Democracy
The victories of WWI and WWII
The fall of the Berln Wall
The rise of global institutions, e.g. the UN, the WTO, the WHO, the World Bank
The rise of the computing revolution
The rise of the internet
The advent of iPhones
The conquest of infectious disease

But Fareed’s take on world events was spectacular in its optimism. He reminded readers that wars can be massive or small, like skirmishes; that peace can be the norm or war can be the norm; that human suffering can be widespread or isolated; and, most of all, he pointed out that the last fifty years have been, on the whole, spectacularly peaceful, wealth-creating, and welbeing-creating.

I am just like everyone else, though. I need a reminder.

The reminder came to me in Nick Kristof’s column this Sunday.

My favorites:

As recently as the 1960s, a majority of humans:

were illiterate. Now fewer than 15 percent are illiterate;
lived in extreme poverty. Now fewer than 10 percent do.

“In another 15 years, illiteracy and extreme poverty will be mostly gone. After thousands of generations, they are pretty much disappearing on our watch.”

“Just since 1990, the lives of more than 100 million children have been saved by vaccinations, diarrhea treatment, breast-feeding promotion and other simple steps.”

The writing is below, and the data supporting the writing is attached.

=================================

CREDIT: https://ourworldindata.org

CREDIT: https://ourworldindata.org/happiness-and-life-satisfaction/

CREDIT: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/06/opinion/sunday/2017-progress-illiteracy-poverty.html?smid=nytcore-ipad-share&smprod=nytcore-ipad

Why 2017 Was the Best Year in Human History

We all know that the world is going to hell. Given the rising risk of nuclear war with North Korea, the paralysis in Congress, warfare in Yemen and Syria, atrocities in Myanmar and a president who may be going cuckoo, you might think 2017 was the worst year ever.

But you’d be wrong. In fact, 2017 was probably the very best year in the long history of humanity.

A smaller share of the world’s people were hungry, impoverished or illiterate than at any time before. A smaller proportion of children died than ever before. The proportion disfigured by leprosy, blinded by diseases like trachoma or suffering from other ailments also fell.

We need some perspective as we watch the circus in Washington, hands over our mouths in horror. We journalists focus on bad news — we cover planes that crash, not those that take off — but the backdrop of global progress may be the most important development in our lifetime.

Every day, the number of people around the world living in extreme poverty (less than about $2 a day) goes down by 217,000, according to calculations by Max Roser, an Oxford University economist who runs a website called Our World in Data. Every day, 325,000 more people gain access to electricity. And 300,000 more gain access to clean drinking water.

Readers often assume that because I cover war, poverty and human rights abuses, I must be gloomy, an Eeyore with a pen. But I’m actually upbeat, because I’ve witnessed transformational change.

As recently as the 1960s, a majority of humans had always been illiterate and lived in extreme poverty. Now fewer than 15 percent are illiterate, and fewer than 10 percent live in extreme poverty. In another 15 years, illiteracy and extreme poverty will be mostly gone. After thousands of generations, they are pretty much disappearing on our watch.

Just since 1990, the lives of more than 100 million children have been saved by vaccinations, diarrhea treatment, breast-feeding promotion and other simple steps.

Steven Pinker, the Harvard psychology professor, explores the gains in a terrific book due out next month, “Enlightenment Now,” in which he recounts the progress across a broad array of metrics, from health to wars, the environment to happiness, equal rights to quality of life. “Intellectuals hate progress,” he writes, referring to the reluctance to acknowledge gains, and I know it feels uncomfortable to highlight progress at a time of global threats. But this pessimism is counterproductive and simply empowers the forces of backwardness.

President Trump rode this gloom to the White House. The idea “Make America Great Again” professes a nostalgia for a lost Eden. But really? If that was, say, the 1950s, the U.S. also had segregation, polio and bans on interracial marriage, gay sex and birth control. Most of the world lived under dictatorships, two-thirds of parents had a child die before age 5, and it was a time of nuclear standoffs, of pea soup smog, of frequent wars, of stifling limits on women and of the worst famine in history.

What moment in history would you prefer to live in?
F. Scott Fitzgerald said the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two contradictory thoughts at the same time. I suggest these: The world is registering important progress, but it also faces mortal threats. The first belief should empower us to act on the second.

Granted, this column may feel weird to you. Those of us in the columny gig are always bemoaning this or that, and now I’m saying that life is great? That’s because most of the time, quite rightly, we focus on things going wrong. But it’s also important to step back periodically. Professor Roser notes that there was never a headline saying, “The Industrial Revolution Is Happening,” even though that was the most important news of the last 250 years.

I had a visit the other day from Sultana, a young Afghan woman from the Taliban heartland. She had been forced to drop out of elementary school. But her home had internet, so she taught herself English, then algebra and calculus with the help of the Khan Academy, Coursera and EdX websites. Without leaving her house, she moved on to physics and string theory, wrestled with Kant and read The New York Times on the side, and began emailing a distinguished American astrophysicist, Lawrence M. Krauss.

I wrote about Sultana in 2016, and with the help of Professor Krauss and my readers, she is now studying at Arizona State University, taking graduate classes. She’s a reminder of the aphorism that talent is universal, but opportunity is not. The meaning of global progress is that such talent increasingly can flourish.

So, sure, the world is a dangerous mess; I worry in particular about the risk of a war with North Korea. But I also believe in stepping back once a year or so to take note of genuine progress — just as, a year ago, I wrote that 2016 had been the best year in the history of the world, and a year from now I hope to offer similar good news about 2018. The most important thing happening right now is not a Trump tweet, but children’s lives saved and major gains in health, education and human welfare.

Every other day this year, I promise to tear my hair and weep and scream in outrage at all the things going wrong. But today, let’s not miss what’s going right.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on January 7, 2018, on Page SR9 of the New York edition with the headline: Why 2017 Was the Best Year in History

World’s biggest battery installation

JAMESTOWN, Australia—Tesla Inc. Chief Executive Elon Musk may have overpromised on production of the company’s latest electric car, but he is delivering on his audacious Australian battery bet.

An enormous Tesla-built battery system—storing electricity from a new wind farm and capable of supplying 30,000 homes for more than an hour—will be powered up over the coming days, the government of South Australia state said Thursday. Final tests are set to be followed by a street party that Mr. Musk, founder of both Tesla and rocket maker Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, was expected to attend.

Success would fulfill the risky pledge Mr. Musk made in March, to deliver a working system in “100 days from contract signature or it is free.” He was answering a Twitter challenge from Australian IT billionaire and environmentalist Mike Cannon-Brookes to help fix electricity problems in South Australia—which relies heavily on renewable energy—after crippling summer blackouts left 1.7 million people without power, some for weeks.

Mr. Cannon-Brookes then brokered talks between Mr. Musk and Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, who has faced criticism from climate groups for winding back renewable-energy policies in favor of coal. South Australia notwithstanding, the country’s per-person greenhouse emissions are among the world’s highest.

South Australia’s government has yet to say how much the battery will cost taxpayers, although renewable-energy experts estimate it at US$50 million. Tesla says the system’s 100-megawatt capacity makes it the world’s largest, tripling the previous record array at Mira Loma in Ontario, Calif., also built by Tesla and U.S. power company Edison.

Quantified Water Movement (QWM)

Think FITBITS for water. The Quantified Water Movement (QWM) is here to stay, with devices that make real-time monitoring of water quality in streams, rivers, lakes and oceans for less than $1,000 per device.

The Stroud Water Research Center in Pennsylvania is leading the way, along with other center of excellence around the world. Stroud has been leading the way on water for fifty years. It is an elite water quality study organization, renowned for its globally relevant science and scientist excellence. Find out more at www.stroudcenter.org.

As a part of this global leadership in the study of water quality, Stroud is advancing the applied technologies that comprise the “quantified water movement” – the real-time monitoring of water quality in streams, rivers, lakes and oceans.

QWM is very much like the “quantified self movement”(see Post on QSM. QSM takes full advantage of low cost sensor and communication technology to “quantify my self”. In other words, I can dramatically advance my understanding about my own personal well-being win areas like exercise, sleep, glucose levels in blood, etc This movement already has proven that real-time reporting on metrics is possible at a very low cost, and on a one-person-at-a-time scale. Apple Watch and FITBIT are examples of commercial products arising out of QSM.

In the same way, QWM takes full advantage of sensors and communication technology to provide real-time reporting on water quality for a given stream, lake, river, or ocean. While still in a formative stage. QWM uses the well-known advances in sensor, big data, and data mining technology to monitor water quality on a real-time basis. Best of all, this applied technology has now reached an affordable price point.

For less than $1,000 per device, it is now possible to fully monitor any body of water, and to report out the findings in a comprehensive dataset. Many leaders believe that less than $100 is possible very soon.

The applied technology ends up being a simple “data logger” coupled with a simple radio transmitter.

Examples of easy-to-measure metrics are:

1. water depth
2. conductivity (measures saltiness or salinity)
3. dissolved oxygen (supports fish and beneficial bacteria)
4. turbidity (a sign of runoff from erosion. Cloudy water actually abrades fish, and prevent fish from finding food)

Training now exists, thanks to Stroud, that is super simple. For example, in one hour, you can learn the capability of this low cost equipment, and the science as to why it is important.

In a two day training, citizen scientists and civil engineers alike can learn how to program their own data logger, attach sensors to the data logger, and deploy and maintain the equipment in an aquatic environment.

All of this and more is illuminated at www.enviroDIY.org.

Dianne Dillon-Ridgley

Karen first met Dianne through the Women’s Network for a Sustainable Future (WNSF).

As I got to know Dianne more, I realized that there were many stories: facets of her experience and interests that make her life very complex, but also very interesting.

I came to realize that she believes that her myriad interests are really one interest: justice.

If I were to try to summarize her interests, I might do it this way:

Sustainability (including Energy, Environment, Environmental Health)
Civil Rights
Women’s Rights

Her story includes many close relatives that were are part of the Thurgood Marshall precedent cases that led up to Brown v Board of Education. That ruling, in 1954, overturned Plessy vs. Ferguson (1896), which held that segregation was legal, so long as facilities were “separate but equal”. The court ruled that segregation violated the Fourteenth Amendment (“no State shall … deny to any person … the equal protection of the laws”).

Her organizational affiliations:

Interface
Howard University (alumnus)
Women’s Network for a Sustainable Future (WNSF)
Green Mountain Energy
Auburn University
River Network
Center for International Environmental Law
National Wildlife Federation
University of Indiana (School for Public Environmental Administration)
Zero Population Growth

Her full biography is below:
Ms. Dianne Dillon-Ridgley serves as an Adjunct Lecturer of University of Indiana School for Public Environmental Administration. Since 1997, Ms. Dillon-Ridgley has represented the World Young Women’s Christian Association at U.N. headquarters. From 1995 to 1998, Ms. Dillon-Ridgley served as a Senior Policy Analyst of the Women’s Environment and Development Organization and from 1998 to 1999, Ms. Dillon-Ridgley served as an Executive Director of that organization. From 1994 to 1997, Ms. Dillon-Ridgley served as a National President of Zero Population Growth, the nation’s largest grassroots organization concerned with rapid population growth and the environment. In 1998, Ms. Dillon-Ridgley was elected to the Global Water Partnership (Stockholm) and in 1999 appointed to the Oxford University Commission on Sustainable Consumption (UK). Ms. Dillon-Ridgley serves as the Chairman of Environmental Advisory Board of Green Mountain Energy Company. Ms. Dillon-Ridgley was appointed by President Clinton to the President’s U.S. Council on Sustainable Development in 1994 and served as Co-Chair of the Council’s International and Population/Consumption Task Forces until the Council’s dissolution in June 1999. Ms. Dillon-Ridgley serves as a Member of Environmental Advisory Board of Green Mountain Energy Company. Ms. Dillon-Ridgley serves as a trustee of River Network, the Center for International Environmental Law, the Natural Step-US and Population Connection. She serves as Director of National Wildlife Federation, Inc. She also serves as a trustee of the International Board of Auburn University’s School of Human Sciences and also serves as a Member of the Editorial Advisory Board for Aspen Law and Business’ Fair Housing and Fair Lending Publications. Ms. Dillon-Ridgley also serves on the Boards of five nonprofit organizations and one private company. Ms. Dillon-Ridgley served as Director of Interface Inc., since February 1997 until May 12, 2014. Ms. Dillon-Ridgley served as a Director of Green Mountain Energy Company since July, 1999. From 1998 to 1999, Ms. Dillon-Ridgley served as an Interim Executive Director of the Women’s Environment and Development Organization, an international women’s advocacy network for environmental, economic and sustainability issues. Ms. Dillon-Ridgley completed her undergraduate work at Howard University and is state-certified by the Iowa Mediation Service as a mediator specializing in agricultural mediation and public policy negotiation.

===============Notes on Brown vs (Topeka) Board of Education (1954) =====

CREDIT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_v._Board_of_Education

Brown v. Board of Education
(Oliver Brown, et al. v. Board of Education of Topeka, et al.)

Supreme Court of the United States
Argued December 9, 1952
Reargued December 8, 1953
Decided May 17, 1954

Citations
347 U.S. 483 (more)
74 S. Ct. 686; 98 L. Ed. 873; 1954 U.S. LEXIS 2094; 53 Ohio Op. 326; 38 A.L.R.2d 1180

Prior history
Judgment for defendants, 98 F. Supp. 797 (D. Kan. 1951)
Subsequent history
Judgment on relief, 349 U.S. 294 (1955) (Brown II); on remand, 139 F. Supp. 468 (D. Kan. 1955); motion to intervene granted, 84 F.R.D. 383 (D. Kan. 1979); judgment for defendants, 671 F. Supp. 1290 (D. Kan. 1987); reversed, 892 F.2d 851 (10th Cir. 1989); vacated, 503 U.S. 978 (1992) (Brown III); judgment reinstated, 978 F.2d 585 (10th Cir. 1992); judgment for defendants, 56 F. Supp. 2d 1212 (D. Kan. 1999)

Holding
Segregation of students in public schools violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, because separate facilities are inherently unequal. District Court of Kansas reversed.NOTE: Fourteenth Amendment says “no State shall … deny to any person … the equal protection of the laws”.

Court membership
Chief Justice
Earl Warren
Associate Justices
Hugo Black · Stanley F. Reed
Felix Frankfurter · William O. Douglas
Robert H. Jackson · Harold H. Burton
Tom C. Clark · Sherman Minton

Case opinions
Majority
Warren, joined by unanimous
Laws applied
U.S. Const. amend. XIV

This case overturned a previous ruling or rulings
Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)
Cumming v. Richmond County Board of Education (1899)
Berea College v. Kentucky (1908)

Educational segregation in the US prior to Brown
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954), was a landmark United States Supreme Court case in which the Court declared state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students to be unconstitutional. The decision overturned the Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896, which allowed state-sponsored segregation, insofar as it applied to public education. Handed down on May 17, 1954, the Warren Court’s unanimous (9–0) decision stated that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” As a result, de jure racial segregation was ruled a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution. This ruling paved the way for integration and was a major victory of the Civil Rights Movement,[1] and a model for many future impact litigation cases.[2] However, the decision’s fourteen pages did not spell out any sort of method for ending racial segregation in schools, and the Court’s second decision in Brown II, 349 U.S. 294 (1955) only ordered states to desegregate “with all deliberate speed”.

Background
For much of the sixty years preceding the Brown case, race relations in the United States had been dominated by racial segregation. This policy had been endorsed in 1896 by the United States Supreme Court case of Plessy v. Ferguson, which held that as long as the separate facilities for the separate races were equal, segregation did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment (“no State shall … deny to any person … the equal protection of the laws”).

The plaintiffs in Brown asserted that this system of racial separation, while masquerading as providing separate but equal treatment of both white and black Americans, instead perpetuated inferior accommodations, services, and treatment for black Americans. Racial segregation in education varied widely from the 17 states that required racial segregation to the 16 in which it was prohibited. Brown was influenced by UNESCO’s 1950 Statement, signed by a wide variety of internationally renowned scholars, titled The Race Question.[3] This declaration denounced previous attempts at scientifically justifying racism as well as morally condemning racism. Another work that the Supreme Court cited was Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944).[4] Myrdal had been a signatory of the UNESCO declaration. The research performed by the educational psychologists Kenneth B. Clark and Mamie Phipps Clark also influenced the Court’s decision.[5] The Clarks’ “doll test” studies presented substantial arguments to the Supreme Court about how segregation affected black school children’s mental status.[6]

The United States and the Soviet Union were both at the height of the Cold War during this time, and U.S. officials, including Supreme Court Justices, were highly aware of the harm that segregation and racism played on America’s international image. When Justice William O. Douglas traveled to India in 1950, the first question he was asked was, “Why does America tolerate the lynching of Negroes?” Douglas later wrote that he had learned from his travels that “the attitude of the United States toward its colored minorities is a powerful factor in our relations with India.” Chief Justice Earl Warren, nominated to the Supreme Court by President Eisenhower, echoed Douglas’s concerns in a 1954 speech to the American Bar Association, proclaiming that “Our American system like all others is on trial both at home and abroad, … the extent to which we maintain the spirit of our constitution with its Bill of Rights, will in the long run do more to make it both secure and the object of adulation than the number of hydrogen bombs we stockpile.”[7][8]

In 1951, a class action suit was filed against the Board of Education of the City of Topeka, Kansas in the United States District Court for the District of Kansas. The plaintiffs were thirteen Topeka parents on behalf of their 20 children.[9]

The suit called for the school district to reverse its policy of racial segregation. The Topeka Board of Education operated separate elementary schools under an 1879 Kansas law, which permitted (but did not require) districts to maintain separate elementary school facilities for black and white students in 12 communities with populations over 15,000. The plaintiffs had been recruited by the leadership of the Topeka NAACP. Notable among the Topeka NAACP leaders were the chairman McKinley Burnett; Charles Scott, one of three serving as legal counsel for the chapter; and Lucinda Todd.

The named plaintiff, Oliver L. Brown, was a parent, a welder in the shops of the Santa Fe Railroad, an assistant pastor at his local church, and an African American.[10] He was convinced to join the lawsuit by Scott, a childhood friend. Brown’s daughter Linda, a third grader, had to walk six blocks to her school bus stop to ride to Monroe Elementary, her segregated black school one mile (1.6 km) away, while Sumner Elementary, a white school, was seven blocks from her house.[11][12]

As directed by the NAACP leadership, the parents each attempted to enroll their children in the closest neighborhood school in the fall of 1951. They were each refused enrollment and directed to the segregated schools. Linda Brown Thompson later recalled the experience in a 2004 PBS documentary:

… well. like I say, we lived in an integrated neighborhood and I had all of these playmates of different nationalities. And so when I found out that day that I might be able to go to their school, I was just thrilled, you know. And I remember walking over to Sumner school with my dad that day and going up the steps of the school and the school looked so big to a smaller child. And I remember going inside and my dad spoke with someone and then he went into the inner office with the principal and they left me out … to sit outside with the secretary. And while he was in the inner office, I could hear voices and hear his voice raised, you know, as the conversation went on. And then he immediately came out of the office, took me by the hand and we walked home from the school. I just couldn’t understand what was happening because I was so sure that I was going to go to school with Mona and Guinevere, Wanda, and all of my playmates.[13]

The case “Oliver Brown et al. v. The Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas” was named after Oliver Brown as a legal strategy to have a man at the head of the roster. The lawyers, and the National Chapter of the NAACP, also felt that having Mr. Brown at the head of the roster would be better received by the U.S. Supreme Court Justices. The 13 plaintiffs were: Oliver Brown, Darlene Brown, Lena Carper, Sadie Emmanuel, Marguerite Emerson, Shirley Fleming, Zelma Henderson, Shirley Hodison, Maude Lawton, Alma Lewis, Iona Richardson, and Lucinda Todd.[14][15] The last surviving plaintiff, Zelma Henderson, died in Topeka, on May 20, 2008, at age 88.[16][17]

The District Court ruled in favor of the Board of Education, citing the U.S. Supreme Court precedent set in Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896), which had upheld a state law requiring “separate but equal” segregated facilities for blacks and whites in railway cars.[18] The three-judge District Court panel found that segregation in public education has a detrimental effect on negro children, but denied relief on the ground that the negro and white schools in Topeka were substantially equal with respect to buildings, transportation, curricula, and educational qualifications of teachers.[19]

Supreme Court review

The case of Brown v. Board of Education as heard before the Supreme Court combined five cases: Brown itself, Briggs v. Elliott (filed in South Carolina), Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County (filed in Virginia), Gebhart v. Belton (filed in Delaware), and Bolling v. Sharpe (filed in Washington D.C.).

All were NAACP-sponsored cases. The Davis case, the only case of the five originating from a student protest, began when 16-year-old Barbara Rose Johns organized and led a 450-student walkout of Moton High School.[20] The Gebhart case was the only one where a trial court, affirmed by the Delaware Supreme Court, found that discrimination was unlawful; in all the other cases the plaintiffs had lost as the original courts had found discrimination to be lawful.

The Kansas case was unique among the group in that there was no contention of gross inferiority of the segregated schools’ physical plant, curriculum, or staff. The district court found substantial equality as to all such factors. The lower court, in its opinion, noted that, in Topeka, “the physical facilities, the curricula, courses of study, qualification and quality of teachers, as well as other educational facilities in the two sets of schools [were] comparable.”[21] The lower court observed that “colored children in many instances are required to travel much greater distances than they would be required to travel could they attend a white school” but also noted that the school district “transports colored children to and from school free of charge” and that “[n]o such service [was] provided to white children.”[21]

In the Delaware case the district court judge in Gebhart ordered that the black students be admitted to the white high school due to the substantial harm of segregation and the differences that made the separate schools unequal.

The NAACP’s chief counsel, Thurgood Marshall—who was later appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1967—argued the case before the Supreme Court for the plaintiffs. Assistant attorney general Paul Wilson—later distinguished emeritus professor of law at the University of Kansas—conducted the state’s ambivalent defense in his first appellate argument.
In December 1952, the Justice Department filed a friend of the court brief in the case. The brief was unusual in its heavy emphasis on foreign-policy considerations of the Truman administration in a case ostensibly about domestic issues. Of the seven pages covering “the interest of the United States,” five focused on the way school segregation hurt the United States in the Cold War competition for the friendship and allegiance of non-white peoples in countries then gaining independence from colonial rule. Attorney General James P. McGranery noted that

The existence of discrimination against minority groups in the United States has an adverse effect upon our relations with other countries. Racial discrimination furnishes grist for the Communist propaganda mills.[22]

The brief also quoted a letter by Secretary of State Dean Acheson lamenting that
The United States is under constant attack in the foreign press, over the foreign radio, and in such international bodies as the United Nations because of various practices of discrimination in this country.[23]

British barrister and parliamentarian Anthony Lester has written that “Although the Court’s opinion in Brown made no reference to these considerations of foreign policy, there is no doubt that they significantly influenced the decision.”[23]

Unanimous opinion and consensus building

The members of the U.S. Supreme Court that on May 17, 1954, ruled unanimously that racial segregation in public schools is unconstitutional.

In spring 1953, the Court heard the case but was unable to decide the issue and asked to rehear the case in fall 1953, with special attention to whether the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause prohibited the operation of separate public schools for whites and blacks.[24]

The Court reargued the case at the behest of Associate Justice Felix Frankfurter, who used reargument as a stalling tactic, to allow the Court to gather a consensus around a Brown opinion that would outlaw segregation. The justices in support of desegregation spent much effort convincing those who initially intended to dissent to join a unanimous opinion. Although the legal effect would be same for a majority rather than unanimous decision, it was felt that dissent could be used by segregation supporters as a legitimizing counter-argument.

Conference notes and draft decisions illustrate the division of opinions before the decision was issued.[25] Justices Douglas, Black, Burton, and Minton were predisposed to overturn Plessy.[25] Fred M. Vinson noted that Congress had not issued desegregation legislation; Stanley F. Reed discussed incomplete cultural assimilation and states’ rights and was inclined to the view that segregation worked to the benefit of the African-American community; Tom C. Clark wrote that “we had led the states on to think segregation is OK and we should let them work it out.”[25] Felix Frankfurter and Robert H. Jackson disapproved of segregation, but were also opposed to judicial activism and expressed concerns about the proposed decision’s enforceability.[25] Chief Justice Vinson had been a key stumbling block. After Vinson died in September 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower appointed Earl Warren as Chief Justice.[25] Warren had supported the integration of Mexican-American students in California school systems following Mendez v. Westminster.[26] However, Eisenhower invited Earl Warren to a White House dinner, where the president told him: “These [southern whites] are not bad people. All they are concerned about is to see that their sweet little girls are not required to sit in school alongside some big overgrown Negroes.” Nevertheless, the Justice Department sided with the African American plaintiffs.[27][28][29]

In his reading of the unanimous decision, Justice Warren noted the adverse psychological effects that segregated schools had on African American children.[30]

While all but one justice personally rejected segregation, the judicial restraint faction questioned whether the Constitution gave the Court the power to order its end. The activist faction believed the Fourteenth Amendment did give the necessary authority and were pushing to go ahead. Warren, who held only a recess appointment, held his tongue until the Senate confirmed his appointment.

Warren convened a meeting of the justices, and presented to them the simple argument that the only reason to sustain segregation was an honest belief in the inferiority of Negroes. Warren further submitted that the Court must overrule Plessy to maintain its legitimacy as an institution of liberty, and it must do so unanimously to avoid massive Southern resistance. He began to build a unanimous opinion.

Although most justices were immediately convinced, Warren spent some time after this famous speech convincing everyone to sign onto the opinion. Justices Jackson and Reed finally decided to drop their dissent. The final decision was unanimous. Warren drafted the basic opinion and kept circulating and revising it until he had an opinion endorsed by all the members of the Court.[31] Reed was the last holdout and reportedly cried during the reading of the opinion.[32]

Holding

Reporters who observed the court holding were surprised by two facts. First, the court made a unanimous decision. Prior to the ruling, there were reports that the court members were sharply divided and might not be able to agree. Second, the attendance of Justice Robert H. Jackson who had suffered a mild heart attack and was not expected to return to the bench until early June 1954. “Perhaps to emphasize the unanimity of the court, perhaps from a desire to be present when the history-making verdict was announced, Justice Jackson was in his accustomed seat when the court convened.”[33] Reporters also noted that Dean Acheson, former secretary of state, who had related the case to foreign policy considerations, and Herbert Brownell, the current attorney general, were in the courtroom.[34]

The key holding of the Court was that, even if segregated black and white schools were of equal quality in facilities and teachers, segregation by itself was harmful to black students and unconstitutional. They found that a significant psychological and social disadvantage was given to black children from the nature of segregation itself, drawing on research conducted by Kenneth Clark assisted by June Shagaloff. This aspect was vital because the question was not whether the schools were “equal”, which under Plessy they nominally should have been, but whether the doctrine of separate was constitutional. The justices answered with a strong “no”:

[D]oes segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race, even though the physical facilities and other “tangible” factors may be equal, deprive the children of the minority group of equal educational opportunities? We believe that it does. …
“Segregation of white and colored children in public schools has a detrimental effect upon the colored children. The effect is greater when it has the sanction of the law, for the policy of separating the races is usually interpreted as denoting the inferiority of the negro group. A sense of inferiority affects the motivation of a child to learn. Segregation with the sanction of law, therefore, has a tendency to [retard] the educational and mental development of negro children and to deprive them of some of the benefits they would receive in a racial[ly] integrated school system.” …

We conclude that, in the field of public education, the doctrine of “separate but equal” has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal. Therefore, we hold that the plaintiffs and others similarly situated for whom the actions have been brought are, by reason of the segregation complained of, deprived of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment.
Local outcomes

Judgement in the Supreme Court Decision for Brown et al. v. Board of Education of Topeka et al.

The Topeka junior high schools had been integrated since 1941. Topeka High School was integrated from its inception in 1871 and its sports teams from 1949 on.[35] The Kansas law permitting segregated schools allowed them only “below the high school level”.[36]
Soon after the district court decision, election outcomes and the political climate in Topeka changed. The Board of Education of Topeka began to end segregation in the Topeka elementary schools in August 1953, integrating two attendance districts. All the Topeka elementary schools were changed to neighborhood attendance centers in January 1956, although existing students were allowed to continue attending their prior assigned schools at their option.[37][38][39] Plaintiff Zelma Henderson, in a 2004 interview, recalled that no demonstrations or tumult accompanied desegregation in Topeka’s schools:
“They accepted it,” she said. “It wasn’t too long until they integrated the teachers and principals.”[40]

The Topeka Public Schools administration building is named in honor of McKinley Burnett, NAACP chapter president who organized the case.[citation needed]

Monroe Elementary was designated a U.S. National Historic Site unit of the National Park Service on October 26, 1992.

Social implications
Not everyone accepted the Brown v. Board of Education decision. In Virginia, Senator Harry F. Byrd, Sr. organized the Massive Resistance movement that included the closing of schools rather than desegregating them.[41] See, for example, The Southern Manifesto. For more implications of the Brown decision, see Desegregation.

Deep South
Texas Attorney General John Ben Shepperd organized a campaign to generate legal obstacles to implementation of desegregation.[42]

In 1957, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus called out his state’s National Guard to block black students’ entry to Little Rock Central High School. President Dwight Eisenhower responded by deploying elements of the 101st Airborne Division from Fort Campbell, Kentucky, to Arkansas and by federalizing Arkansas’s National Guard.[43]

Also in 1957, Florida’s response was mixed. Its legislature passed an Interposition Resolution denouncing the decision and declaring it null and void. But Florida Governor LeRoy Collins, though joining in the protest against the court decision, refused to sign it, arguing that the attempt to overturn the ruling must be done by legal methods.
In Mississippi fear of violence prevented any plaintiff from bringing a school desegregation suit for the next nine years.[44] When Medgar Evers sued to desegregate Jackson, Mississippi schools in 1963 White Citizens Council member Byron De La Beckwith murdered him.[45] Two subsequent trials resulted in hung juries. Beckwith was not convicted of the murder until 1994.[46]

In 1963, Alabama Gov. George Wallace personally blocked the door to Foster Auditorium at the University of Alabama to prevent the enrollment of two black students. This became the infamous Stand in the Schoolhouse Door[47] where Wallace personally backed his “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” policy that he had stated in his 1963 inaugural address.[48] He moved aside only when confronted by General Henry Graham of the Alabama National Guard, who was ordered by President John F. Kennedy to intervene.
Upland South

In North Carolina, there was often a strategy of nominally accepting Brown, but tacitly resisting it. On May 18, 1954 the Greensboro, North Carolina school board declared that it would abide by the Brown ruling. This was the result of the initiative of D.E. Hudgins Jr, a former Rhodes Scholar and prominent attorney, who chaired the school board. This made Greensboro the first, and for years the only, city in the South, to announce its intent to comply. However, others in the city resisted integration, putting up legal obstacles[how?] to the actual implementation of school desegregation for years afterward, and in 1969, the federal government found the city was not in compliance with the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Transition to a fully integrated school system did not begin until 1971, after numerous local lawsuits and both nonviolent and violent demonstrations. Historians have noted the irony that Greensboro, which had heralded itself as such a progressive city, was one of the last holdouts for school desegregation.[49][50]
In Moberly, Missouri, the schools were desegregated, as ordered. However, after 1955, the African-American teachers from the local “negro school” were not retained; this was ascribed to poor performance. They appealed their dismissal in Naomi Brooks et al., Appellants, v. School District of City of Moberly, Missouri, Etc., et al.; but it was upheld, and SCOTUS declined to hear a further appeal.[51][52]

North
Many Northern cities also had de facto segregation policies, which resulted in a vast gulf in educational resources between black and white communities. In Harlem, New York, for example, not a single new school had been built since the turn of the century, nor did a single nursery school exist, even as the Second Great Migration caused overcrowding of existing schools. Existing schools tended to be dilapidated and staffed with inexperienced teachers. Northern officials were in denial of the segregation, but Brown helped stimulate activism among African-American parents like Mae Mallory who, with support of the NAACP, initiated a successful lawsuit against the city and State of New York on Brown’s principles. Mallory and thousands of other parents bolstered the pressure of the lawsuit with a school boycott in 1959. During the boycott, some of the first freedom schools of the period were established. The city responded to the campaign by permitting more open transfers to high-quality, historically-white schools. (New York’s African-American community, and Northern desegregation activists generally, now found themselves contending with the problem of white flight, however.)[53][54]

The intellectual roots of Plessy v. Ferguson, the landmark United States Supreme Court decision upholding the constitutionality of racial segregation in 1896 under the doctrine of “separate but equal” were, in part, tied to the scientific racism of the era.[55][56] However, the popular support for the decision was more likely a result of the racist beliefs held by many whites at the time.[57] In deciding Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court rejected the ideas of scientific racists about the need for segregation, especially in schools. The Court buttressed its holding by citing (in footnote 11) social science research about the harms to black children caused by segregated schools.

Both scholarly and popular ideas of hereditarianism played an important role in the attack and backlash that followed the Brown decision.[57] The Mankind Quarterly was founded in 1960, in part in response to the Brown decision.[58][59]
Legal criticism and praise

U.S. circuit judges Robert A. Katzmann, Damon J. Keith, and Sonia Sotomayor at a 2004 exhibit on the Fourteenth Amendment, Thurgood Marshall, and Brown v. Board of Education
William Rehnquist wrote a memo titled “A Random Thought on the Segregation Cases” when he was a law clerk for Justice Robert H. Jackson in 1952, during early deliberations that led to the Brown v. Board of Education decision. In his memo, Rehnquist argued: “I realize that it is an unpopular and unhumanitarian position, for which I have been excoriated by ‘liberal’ colleagues but I think Plessy v. Ferguson was right and should be reaffirmed.” Rehnquist continued, “To the argument . . . that a majority may not deprive a minority of its constitutional right, the answer must be made that while this is sound in theory, in the long run it is the majority who will determine what the constitutional rights of the minorities are.”[60] Rehnquist also argued for Plessy with other law clerks.[61]
However, during his 1971 confirmation hearings, Rehnquist said, “I believe that the memorandum was prepared by me as a statement of Justice Jackson’s tentative views for his own use.” Justice Jackson had initially planned to join a dissent in Brown.[62] Later, at his 1986 hearings for the slot of Chief Justice, Rehnquist put further distance between himself and the 1952 memo: “The bald statement that Plessy was right and should be reaffirmed, was not an accurate reflection of my own views at the time.”[63] In any event, while serving on the Supreme Court, Rehnquist made no effort to reverse or undermine the Brown decision, and frequently relied upon it as precedent.[64]

Chief Justice Warren’s reasoning was broadly criticized by contemporary legal academics with Judge Learned Hand decrying that the Supreme Court had “assumed the role of a third legislative chamber”[65] and Herbert Wechsler finding Brown impossible to justify based on neutral principles.[66]

Some aspects of the Brown decision are still debated. Notably, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, himself an African American, wrote in Missouri v. Jenkins (1995) that at the very least, Brown I has been misunderstood by the courts.

Brown I did not say that “racially isolated” schools were inherently inferior; the harm that it identified was tied purely to de jure segregation, not de facto segregation. Indeed, Brown I itself did not need to rely upon any psychological or social-science research in order to announce the simple, yet fundamental truth that the Government cannot discriminate among its citizens on the basis of race. …

Segregation was not unconstitutional because it might have caused psychological feelings of inferiority. Public school systems that separated blacks and provided them with superior educational resources making blacks “feel” superior to whites sent to lesser schools—would violate the Fourteenth Amendment, whether or not the white students felt stigmatized, just as do school systems in which the positions of the races are reversed. Psychological injury or benefit is irrelevant …

Given that desegregation has not produced the predicted leaps forward in black educational achievement, there is no reason to think that black students cannot learn as well when surrounded by members of their own race as when they are in an integrated environment. (…) Because of their “distinctive histories and traditions,” black schools can function as the center and symbol of black communities, and provide examples of independent black leadership, success, and achievement.[67]

Some Constitutional originalists, notably Raoul Berger in his influential 1977 book “Government by Judiciary,” make the case that Brown cannot be defended by reference to the original understanding of the 14th Amendment. They support this reading of the 14th amendment by noting that the Civil Rights Act of 1875 did not ban segregated schools and that the same Congress that passed the 14th Amendment also voted to segregate schools in the District of Columbia. Other originalists, including Michael W. McConnell, a federal judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, in his article “Originalism and the Desegregation Decisions,” argue that the Radical Reconstructionists who spearheaded the 14th Amendment were in favor of desegregated southern schools.[68] Evidence supporting this interpretation of the 14th amendment has come from archived Congressional records showing that proposals for federal legislation which would enforce school integration were debated in Congress a few years following the amendment’s ratification.[69]

The case also has attracted some criticism from more liberal authors, including some who say that Chief Justice Warren’s reliance on psychological criteria to find a harm against segregated blacks was unnecessary. For example, Drew S. Days has written:[70] “we have developed criteria for evaluating the constitutionality of racial classifications that do not depend upon findings of psychic harm or social science evidence. They are based rather on the principle that ‘distinctions between citizens solely because of their ancestry are by their very nature odious to a free people whose institutions are founded upon the doctrine of equality,’ Hirabayashi v. United States, 320 U.S. 81 (1943). . . .

In his book The Tempting of America (page 82), Robert Bork endorsed the Brown decision as follows:
By 1954, when Brown came up for decision, it had been apparent for some time that segregation rarely if ever produced equality. Quite aside from any question of psychology, the physical facilities provided for blacks were not as good as those provided for whites. That had been demonstrated in a long series of cases … The Court’s realistic choice, therefore, was either to abandon the quest for equality by allowing segregation or to forbid segregation in order to achieve equality. There was no third choice. Either choice would violate one aspect of the original understanding, but there was no possibility of avoiding that. Since equality and segregation were mutually inconsistent, though the ratifiers did not understand that, both could not be honored. When that is seen, it is obvious the Court must choose equality and prohibit state-imposed segregation. The purpose that brought the fourteenth amendment into being was equality before the law, and equality, not separation, was written into the law.

In June 1987, Philip Elman, a civil rights attorney who served as an associate in the Solicitor General’s office during Harry Truman’s term, claimed he and Associate Justice Felix Frankfurter were mostly responsible for the Supreme Court’s decision, and stated that the NAACP’s arguments did not present strong evidence.[71] Elman has been criticized for offering a self-aggrandizing history of the case, omitting important facts, and denigrating the work of civil rights attorneys who had laid the groundwork for the decision over many decades.[72] However, Frankfurter was also known for being one of court’s most outspoken advocates of the judicial restraint philosophy of basing court rulings on existing law rather than personal or political considerations.[73][74] Public officials in the United States today are nearly unanimous in lauding the ruling. In May 2004, the fiftieth anniversary of the ruling, President George W. Bush spoke at the opening of the Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site, calling Brown “a decision that changed America for the better, and forever.”[75] Most Senators and Representatives issued press releases hailing the ruling.

In an article in Townhall, Thomas Sowell argued that When Chief Justice Earl Warren declared in the landmark 1954 case of Brown v. Board of Education that racially separate schools were “inherently unequal,” Dunbar High School was a living refutation of that assumption. And it was within walking distance of the Supreme Court.”[76]

Brown II

In 1955, the Supreme Court considered arguments by the schools requesting relief concerning the task of desegregation. In their decision, which became known as “Brown II”[77] the court delegated the task of carrying out school desegregation to district courts with orders that desegregation occur “with all deliberate speed,” a phrase traceable to Francis Thompson’s poem, The Hound of Heaven.[78]

Supporters of the earlier decision were displeased with this decision. The language “all deliberate speed” was seen by critics as too ambiguous to ensure reasonable haste for compliance with the court’s instruction. Many Southern states and school districts interpreted “Brown II” as legal justification for resisting, delaying, and avoiding significant integration for years—and in some cases for a decade or more—using such tactics as closing down school systems, using state money to finance segregated “private” schools, and “token” integration where a few carefully selected black children were admitted to former white-only schools but the vast majority remained in underfunded, unequal black schools.[79]

For example, based on “Brown II,” the U.S. District Court ruled that Prince Edward County, Virginia did not have to desegregate immediately. When faced with a court order to finally begin desegregation in 1959 the county board of supervisors stopped appropriating money for public schools, which remained closed for five years, from 1959 to 1964.

White students in the county were given assistance to attend white-only “private academies” that were taught by teachers formerly employed by the public school system, while black students had no education at all unless they moved out of the county. But the public schools reopened after the Supreme Court overturned “Brown II” in Griffin v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, declaring that “…the time for mere ‘deliberate speed’ has run out,” and that the county must provide a public school system for all children regardless of race.[80]

Brown III

In 1978, Topeka attorneys Richard Jones, Joseph Johnson and Charles Scott, Jr. (son of the original Brown team member), with assistance from the American Civil Liberties Union, persuaded Linda Brown Smith—who now had her own children in Topeka schools—to be a plaintiff in reopening Brown. They were concerned that the Topeka Public Schools’ policy of “open enrollment” had led to and would lead to further segregation. They also believed that with a choice of open enrollment, white parents would shift their children to “preferred” schools that would create both predominantly African American and predominantly European American schools within the district. The district court reopened the Brown case after a 25-year hiatus, but denied the plaintiffs’ request finding the schools “unitary”. In 1989, a three-judge panel of the Tenth Circuit on 2–1 vote found that the vestiges of segregation remained with respect to student and staff assignment. In 1993, the Supreme Court denied the appellant School District’s request for certiorari and returned the case to District Court Judge Richard Rodgers for implementation of the Tenth Circuit’s mandate.

After a 1994 plan was approved and a bond issue passed, additional elementary magnet schools were opened and district attendance plans redrawn, which resulted in the Topeka schools meeting court standards of racial balance by 1998. Unified status was eventually granted to Topeka Unified School District No. 501 on July 27, 1999. One of the new magnet schools is named after the Scott family attorneys for their role in the Brown case and civil rights.[81]

Related cases
• Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896)—separate but equal for public facilities
• Cumming v. Richmond County Board of Education 175 U.S. 528 (1899)—sanctioned de jure segregation of races
• Lum v. Rice, 275 U.S. 78 (1927)—separate schools for Chinese pupils from white schoolchildren
• Powell v. Alabama, 287 U.S. 45 (1932)—access to counsel
• Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada, 305 U.S. 337 (1938)-states that provide a school to white students must provide in-state education to blacks
• Smith v. Allwright, 321 U.S. 649 (1944)—non-white voters in primary schools
• Hedgepeth and Williams v. Board of Education (1944)-prohibited racial segregation in New Jersey schools.
• Mendez v. Westminster, 64 F. Supp. 544 (1946)—prohibits segregating Mexican American children in California
• Sipuel v. Board of Regents of Univ. of Okla., 332 U.S. 631 (1948)—access to taxpayer state funded law schools
• Shelley v. Kraemer, 334 U.S. 1 (1948)—restrictive covenants
• Sweatt v. Painter, 339 U.S. 629 (1950)—segregated law schools in Texas
• McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents, 339 U.S. 637 (1950)—prohibits segregation in a public institution of higher learning
• Hernandez v. Texas, 347 U.S. 475 (1954)—the Fourteenth Amendment protects those beyond the racial classes of white or Negro.
• Briggs v. Elliott, 347 U.S. 483 (1952) Brown Case #1—Summerton, South Carolina.
• Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, 103 F. Supp. 337 (1952) Brown Case #2—Prince Edward County, Virginia.
• Gebhart v. Belton, 33 Del. Ch. 144 (1952) Brown Case #3—Claymont, Delaware
• Bolling v. Sharpe, 347 U.S. 497 (1954) Brown companion case—dealt with the constitutionality of segregation in the District of Columbia, which—as a federal district, not a state—is not subject to the Fourteenth Amendment.
• Browder v. Gayle, 142 F. Supp. 707 (1956) – Montgomery, Alabama bus segregation is unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment protections for equal treatment.
• NAACP v. Alabama, 357 U.S. 449 (1958)—privacy of NAACP membership lists, and free association of members
• Cooper v. Aaron, 358 U.S. 1 (1958) – Federal court enforcement of desegregation
• Boynton v. Virginia, 364 U.S. 454 (1960) – outlawed racial segregation in public transportation
• Heart of Atlanta Motel v. United States, 379 U.S. 241 (1964)—held constitutional the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which banned racial discrimination in public places, particularly in public accommodations even in private property.
• Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967) – banned anti-miscegenation laws (race-based restrictions on marriage).
• Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education, 396 U.S. 1218 (1969) – changed Brown’s requirement of desegregation “with all deliberate speed” to one of “desegregation now”
• Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, 402 U.S. 1 (1971) – established bussing as a solution
• Guey Heung Lee v. Johnson, 404 U.S 1215 (1971) – “Brown v. Board of Education was not written for blacks alone”, desegregation of Asian schools in opposition to parents of Asian students
• Milliken v. Bradley, 418 U.S. 717 (1974) – rejected bussing across school district lines.
• Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1,[82] 551 U.S. 701, 127 S. Ct. 2738 (2007)—rejected using race as the sole determining factor for assigning students to schools.[83]
• List of United States Supreme Court Cases
* See Case citation for an explanation of these numbers.
See also
• African-American Civil Rights Movement (1896–1954)
• Little Rock Nine
• Rubey Mosley Hulen, federal judge who made a similar ruling in an earlier case
• Timeline of the African American Civil Rights Movement
• Ruby Bridges, the first black child to attend an all-white elementary school in the South
References
1 Jump up 
^ Brown v Board of Education Decision ~ Civil Rights Movement Veterans
2 Jump up 
^ Schuck, P.H. (2006). Meditations of a Militant Moderate: Cool Views on Hot Topics. G – Reference, Information and Interdisciplinary Subjects Series. Rowman & Littlefield. p. 104. ISBN 978-0-7425-3961-7.
3 Jump up 
^ Harald E.L. Prins. “Toward a World without Evil: Alfred Métraux as UNESCO Anthropologist (1946–1962)”. UNESCO. “As a direct offshoot of the 1948 “Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” it sought to dismantle any scientific justification or basis for racism and proclaimed that race was not a biological fact of nature but a dangerous social myth. As a milestone, this critically important declaration contributed to the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court desegregation decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.’”(in English)
4 Jump up 
^ Myrdal, Gunnar (1944). An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. New York: Harper & Row.
5 Jump up 
^ “Desegregation to diversity?”. American Psychological Association. 2004. Retrieved May 15, 2008.
6 Jump up 
^ “Kenneth Clark, 90; His Studies Influenced Ban on Segregation – Los Angeles Times”. Los Angeles Times. May 3, 2005. Retrieved October 15, 2010.
7 Jump up 
^ Mary L. Dudziak, “The Global Impact of Brown v. Board of Education” SCOTUS Blog
8 Jump up 
^ Mary L Dudziak “Brown as a Cold War Case” Journal of American History, June 2004 Archived December 7, 2014, at the Wayback Machine.
9 Jump up 
^ Anderson, Legacy of Brown: Many people part of local case, Thirteen parents representing 20 children signed up as Topeka plaintiffs, The Topeka Capital-Journal (Sunday, May 9, 2004).
10 Jump up 
^ Black, White, and Brown, PBS NewsHour (May 12, 2004).
11 Jump up 
^ Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka MSN Encarta, archived on October 31, 2009 from the original Archived October 31, 2009, at WebCite
12 Jump up 
^ “Interactive map of locations in Topeka important to the Brown case – Topeka Capital Journal online”. Cjonline.com. October 26, 1992. Retrieved October 15, 2010.
13 Jump up 
^ Black/White & Brown Archived September 10, 2005, at the Wayback Machine., transcript of program produced by KTWU Channel 11 in Topeka, Kansas. Originally aired May 3, 2004.
14 Jump up 
^ Brown Foundation for Educational Equity, Excellence and Research, Myths Versus Truths Archived June 27, 2005, at the Wayback Machine. (revised April 11, 2004)
15 Jump up 
^ Ric Anderson, Legacy of Brown: Many people part of local case, Thirteen parents representing 20 children signed up as Topeka plaintiffs, The Topeka Capital-Journal (Sunday, May 9, 2004).
16 Jump up 
^ Fox, Margalit (May 22, 2008). “Zelma Henderson, Who Aided Desegregation, Dies at 88”. The New York Times. Retrieved May 29, 2008.
17 Jump up 
^ Last surviving Brown v. Board plaintiff dies at 88 The Associated Press, May 21, 2008, archived on May 24, 2008 from the original
18 Jump up 
^ School facilities for Negroes here held comparable, The Topeka State Journal (August 3, 1951)
19 Jump up 
^ Brown v. Board of Education, 98 F. Supp. 797 Archived January 4, 2009, at the Wayback Machine. (August 3, 1951).
20 Jump up 
^ Student Strike at Moton High ~ Civil Rights Movement Veterans
21 ^ Jump up to: 
a b Brown v. Board of Education, 98 F. Supp. 797, 798 (D. Kan. 1951), rev’d, 347 U.S. 483 (1954).
22 Jump up 
^ Aryeh Neier “Brown v. Board of Ed: Key Cold War weapon” Reuters Blog, May 14, 2014
23 ^ Jump up to: 
a b Antonly Lester, “Brown v. Board of Education Overseas” PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY VOL. 148, NO. 4, DECEMBER 2004
24 Jump up 
^ See Smithsonian, “Separate is Not Equal: Brown v. Board of Education Archived June 30, 2015, at the Wayback Machine.
25 ^ Jump up to: 
a b c d e Cass R. Sunstein (May 3, 2004). “Did Brown Matter?”. The New Yorker. Retrieved January 22, 2010.
26 Jump up 
^ George R. Goethals, Georgia Jones Sorenson (2006). The quest for a general theory of leadership. Edward Elgar Publishing. p. 165. ISBN 978-1-84542-541-8.
27 Jump up 
^ Digital History:Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954)
28 Jump up 
^ The Gang That Always Liked Ike
29 Jump up 
^ Warren, Earl (1977). The Memoirs of Earl Warren. New York: Doubleday & Company. p. 291. ISBN 0385128355.
30 Jump up 
^ Mungazi, D. A. (2001). Journey to the promised land: The African American struggle for development since the Civil War (pp. 46). Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group
31 Jump up 
^ Patterson, James T. (2001). Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-515632-3.
32 Jump up 
^ Caro, Robert A. (2002). Master of the Senate. Vintage Books. p. 696. ISBN 9780394720951. Retrieved 17 May 2017.
33 Jump up 
^ Huston, Luther A. (18 May 1954). “High Court Bans School Segregation; 9-to-0 Decision Grants Time to Comply”. The New York Times. Retrieved 6 March 2013.
34 Jump up 
^ “AP WAS THERE: Original 1954 Brown v. Board story” Archived December 9, 2014, at the Wayback Machine.
35 Jump up 
^ “Topeka Capital Journal article on integration of THS sports teams”. Cjonline.com. July 10, 2001. Retrieved October 15, 2010.
36 Jump up 
^ “Topeka Capital Journal on line article”. Cjonline.com. February 28, 2002. Retrieved October 15, 2010.
37 Jump up 
^ “Racial bar down for teachers here”, Topeka Daily Capital (January 19, 1956)
38 Jump up 
^ “First step taken to end segregation”, Topeka Daily Capital (September 9, 1953)
39 Jump up 
^ “Little Effect On Topeka” Topeka Capital-Journal (May 18, 1954)
40 Jump up 
^ Erin Adamson, “Breaking barriers: Topekans reflect on role in desegregating nation’s schools” Archived April 27, 2004, at the Wayback Machine., Topeka Capital Journal (May 11, 2003)
41 Jump up 
^ “Massive Resistance” to Integration ~ Civil Rights Movement Veterans
42 Jump up 
^ Howell, Mark C., John Ben Shepperd, Attorney General of the State of Texas: His Role in the Continuation of Segregation in Texas, 1953-1957, Master’s Thesis, The University of Texas of the Permian Basin, Odessa, Texas, July 2003.
43 Jump up 
^ The Little Rock Nine ~ Civil Rights Movement Veterans
44 Jump up 
^ Michael Klarman, The Supreme Court, 2012 Term – Comment: Windsor and Brown: Marriage Equality and Racial Equality 127 Harv. L. Rev. 127, 153 (2013).
45 Jump up 
^ Id. citing Karlman, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality at 352-354 (2004).
46 Jump up 
^ De La Beckwith v. State, 707 So. 2d 547 (Miss. 1997).
47 Jump up 
^ Standing In the Schoolhouse Door ~ Civil Rights Movement Veterans
48 Jump up 
^ The American Experience; George Wallace: Settin’ the Woods on Fire; Wallace Quotes, Public Broadcasting Service, pbs.org, 2000. Retrieved February 6, 2007.
49 Jump up 
^ Desegregation and Integration of Greensboro’s Public Schools, 1954-1974
50 Jump up 
^ “Summary of ‘Civilities and Civil Rights’: by William H. Chafe” George Mason University website
51 Jump up 
^ http://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F2/267/733/393864/
52 Jump up 
^ http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/13-miss-buchanans-period-of-adjustment
53 Jump up 
^ Melissa F. Weiner, Power, Protest, and the Public Schools: Jewish and African American Struggles in New York City (Rutgers University Press, 2010) p. 51-66
54 Jump up 
^ Adina Back “Exposing the Whole Segregation Myth: The Harlem Nine and New York City Schools” in Freedom north: Black freedom struggles outside the South, 1940-1980, Jeanne Theoharis, Komozi Woodard, eds.(Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) p. 65-91
55 Jump up 
^ Austin Sarat (1997). Race, Law, and Culture: Reflections on Brown v. Board of Education. Oxford University Press. p. 55. ISBN 978-0-19-510622-0. “What lay behind Plessy v. Ferguson? There were, perhaps, some important intellectual roots; this was the era of scientific racism.”
56 Jump up 
^ Charles A. Lofgren (1988). The Plessy Case. Oxford University Press. p. 184. ISBN 978-0-19-505684-6. “But he [ Henry Billings Brown ] at minimum established popular sentiment and practice, along with legal and scientific testimony on race, as a link in his train of reasoning.”
57 ^ Jump up to: 
a b Race, Law, and Culture: Reflections on Brown v. Board of Education By Austin Sarat. Page 55 and 59. 1997. ISBN 0-19-510622-9
58 Jump up 
^ Schaffer, Gavin (2007). “”‘Scientific’ Racism Again?”: Reginald Gates, the Mankind Quarterly and the Question of “Race” in Science after the Second World War”. Journal of American Studies. 41 (2): 253–278. doi:10.1017/S0021875807003477.
59 Jump up 
^ Science for Segregation: Race, Law, and the Case Against Brown v. Board of Education. By John P. Jackson. ISBN 0-8147-4271-8 Page 148
60 Jump up 
^ William Rehnquist, “A Random Thought on the Segregation Cases” Archived June 15, 2007, at the Wayback Machine., S. Hrg. 99-1067, Hearings Before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary on the Nomination of Justice William Hubbs Rehnquist to be Chief Justice of the United States (July 29, 30, 31, and August 1, 1986).
61 Jump up 
^ Peter S. Canellos,Memos may not hold Roberts’s opinions, The Boston Globe, August 23, 2005. Here is what Rehnquist said in 1986 about his conversations with other clerks about Plessy: I thought Plessy had been wrongly decided at the time, that it was not a good interpretation of the equal protection clause to say that when you segregate people by race, there is no denial of equal protection. But Plessy had been on the books for 60 years; Congress had never acted, and the same Congress that had promulgated the 14th Amendment had required segregation in the District schools. . . . I saw factors on both sides. . . . I did not agree then, and I certainly do not agree now, with the statement that Plessy against Ferguson is right and should be reaffirmed. I had ideas on both sides, and I do not think I ever really finally settled in my own mind on that. . . . [A]round the lunch table I am sure I defended it. . . . I thought there were good arguments to be made in support of it.

S. Hrg. 99-1067, Hearings Before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary on the Nomination of Justice William Hubbs Rehnquist to be Chief Justice of the United States (July 29, 30, 31, and August 1, 1986).
62 Jump up 
^ Justice William O. Douglas wrote: “In the original conference there were only four who voted that segregation in the public schools was unconstitutional. Those four were Black, Burton, Minton, and myself.” See Bernard Schwartz, Decision: How the Supreme Court Decides Cases, page 96 (Oxford 1996). Likewise, Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote: “I have no doubt that if the segregation cases had reached decision last term, there would have been four dissenters—Vinson, Reed, Jackson, and Clark.” Id. Justice Jackson’s longtime legal secretary had a different view, calling Rehnquist’s Senate testimony an attempt to “smear the reputation of a great justice.” See Alan Dershowitz, Telling the Truth About Chief Justice Rehnquist, Huffington Post, September 5, 2005. Retrieved March 15, 2007. See also Felix Frankfurter on the death of Justice Vinson.
63 Jump up 
^ Adam Liptak, The Memo That Rehnquist Wrote and Had to Disown, NY Times (September 11, 2005)
64 Jump up 
^ Cases where Justice Rehnquist has cited Brown v. Board of Education in support of a proposition Archived June 15, 2007, at the Wayback Machine., S. Hrg. 99-1067, Hearings Before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary on the Nomination of Justice William Hubbs Rehnquist to be Chief Justice of the United States (July 29, 30, 31, and August 1, 1986). Also see Jeffery Rosen, Rehnquist the Great?, Atlantic Monthly (April 2005): “Rehnquist ultimately embraced the Warren Court’s Brown decision, and after he joined the Court he made no attempt to dismantle the civil-rights revolution, as political opponents feared he would”.
65 Jump up 
^ Michael Klarman, The Supreme Court, 2012 Term – Comment: Windsor and Brown: Marriage Equality and Racial Equality, 127 Harv. L. Rev. 127, 142 (2013) citing Learned Hand, The Bill of Rights at 55 (Oliver Wendell Holmes Lecture, 1958).
66 Jump up 
^ Id., Pamela Karlan, “What Can Brown Do For You: Neutral Principles and the Struggle Over the Equal Protection Clause, 58 DUKE L.J. 1049 (2008) citing Herbert Wechsler, Toward Neutral Principles of Constitutional Law, 73 HARV. L. REV. 1 (Oliver Wendell Holmes Lecture, 1959).
67 Jump up 
^ Missouri v. Jenkins, 515 U.S. 70 (1995) (Thomas, J., concurring).
68 Jump up 
^ McConnell, Michael W. (May 1995). “Originalism and the desegregation decisions”. Virginia Law Review. The Virginia Law Review Association via JSTOR. 81 (4): 947–1140. JSTOR 1073539. doi:10.2307/1073539.
• Response to McConnell: Klarman, Michael J. (October 1995). “Response: Brown, originalism, and constitutional theory: a response to Professor Mcconnell”. Virginia Law Review. The Virginia Law Review Association via JSTOR. 81 (7): 1881–1936. JSTOR 1073643. doi:10.2307/1073643.
• Response to Klarman: McConnell, Michael W. (October 1995). “Reply: The originalist justification for Brown: a reply to Professor Klarman”. Virginia Law Review. The Virginia Law Review Association via JSTOR. 81 (7): 1937–1955. JSTOR 1073644. doi:10.2307/1073644.
69 



70 Jump up 
^ Adam Liptak (November 9, 2009). “From 19th-Century View, Desegregation Is a Test”. New York Times. Retrieved June 4, 2013.
71 Jump up 
^ Days, III, Drew S. (2001), “Days, J., concurring”, in Balkan, Jack; Ackerman, Bruce A., What ‘Brown v. Board of Education’ should have said, New York: New York University Press, p. 97, ISBN 9780814798904. Preview.
72 Jump up 
^ Harvard Law Review, Vol. 100, No. 8 (June 1987), pp. 1938–1948
73 Jump up 
^ See, e.g., Randall Kennedy. “A Reply to Philip Elman.” Harvard Law Review 100 (1987):1938–1948.
74 Jump up 
^ A Justice for All, by Kim Isaac Eisler, page 11; ISBN 0-671-76787-9
75 Jump up 
^ “Supreme Court History: Expanding civil rights, biographies of the robes: Felix Frankfurter”. pbs.org/wnet. Educational Broadcasting Corp., PBS.
76 Jump up 
^ Remarks by the President at Grand Opening of the Brown v Board of Education National Historic Site, Topeka, Kansas (May 17, 2004)
77 Jump up 
^ Thomas Sowell (October 4, 2016). “Dunbar High School After 100 Years”. townhall.com.
78 Jump up 
^ Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 349 U.S. 294 (1955)
79 Jump up 
^ Jim Chen, Poetic Justice, 29 Cardozo Law Review (2007)
80 Jump up 
^ The “Brown II,” “All Deliberate Speed” Decision ~ Civil Rights Movement Veterans
81 Jump up 
^ Smith, Bob (1965). They Closed Their Schools. University of North Carolina Press.
82 Jump up 
^ Topeka Public Schools Desegregation History: “The Naming of Scott Computer Technology Magnet” Archived October 1, 2007, at the Wayback Machine.
83 Jump up 
^ “FindLaw | Cases and Codes”. Caselaw.lp.findlaw.com. Retrieved October 15, 2010.
84 Jump up 
^ For analysis of this decision, see also Joel K. Goldstein, “Not Hearing History: A Critique of Chief Justice Roberts’s Reinterpretation of Brown,” 69 Ohio St. L.J. 791 (2008)
Further reading
• Keppel, Ben. Brown v. Board and the Transformation of American Culture (LSU Press, 2016). xiv, 225 pp.
• Kluger, Richard (1975). Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America’s Struggle for Equality. New York: Knopf. ISBN 9780394472898.
External video
Booknotes interview with Charles Ogletree on All Deliberate Speed, May 9, 2004, C-SPAN
• Ogletree, Charles J., Jr. (2004). All Deliberate Speed: Reflections on the First Half Century of Brown v. Board of Education. New York: W.W. Norton. ISBN 9780393058970.
• Patterson, James T., and William W. Freehling. Brown v. Board of Education: A civil rights milestone and its troubled legacy (Oxford University Press, 2001).
• Tushnet, Mark V. (2008). “”Our decision does not end but begins the struggle over segregation” Brown v. Board of Education, 1954: Justice Robert H. Jackson”. In Tushnet, Mark V. I dissent: Great Opposing Opinions in Landmark Supreme Court Cases. Boston: Beacon Press. pp. 133–150. ISBN 9780807000366. Preview.
External links

Wikisource has original text related to this article:
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (347 U.S. 483)

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Brown v. Board of Education.
• Case Brief for Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka at Lawnix.com
• Case information and transcripts on The Curiae Project
• Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site (US Park Service)
• Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954) (full text with hyperlinks to cited material)
• A copy of Florida’s 1957 Interposition Resolution in Response to the Brown decision, with Gov. Collin’s handwritten rejection of it. Made available for public use by the State Archives of Florida.
• U.S. District Court of Kansas: Records of Brown v. Board of Education, Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library
• Online documents relating to Brown vs. Board of Education, Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library
• Documents from the district court, including the original complaint and trial transcript, at the Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse
• 60th Anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education curated by Michigan State University’s Diversity of Excellence through Artistic Expression
• Brown v. Board of Education, Civil Rights Digital Library.
• “Supreme Court Landmark Case Brown v. Board of Education” from C-SPAN’s Landmark Cases: 12 Historic Supreme Court Decisions
[hide]
• v t e

African-American Civil Rights Movement (1954–1968)

Notable
events
(timeline)

1954–1959
• • • • • Brown v. Board of Education Bolling v. Sharpe Briggs v. Elliott Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County Gebhart v. Belton Sarah Keys v. Carolina Coach Company Emmett Till Montgomery bus boycott Browder v. Gayle Tallahassee bus boycott Mansfield school desegregation 1957 Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom “Give Us the Ballot” Royal Ice Cream Sit-in Little Rock Nine National Guard blockade Civil Rights Act of 1957 Kissing Case Biloxi Wade-Ins

1960–1963
• • • • • Greensboro sit-ins Nashville sit-ins Sit-in movement Civil Rights Act of 1960 Gomillion v. Lightfoot Boynton v. Virginia Rock Hill sit-ins Robert F. Kennedy’s Law Day Address Freedom Rides attacks Garner v. Louisiana Albany Movement University of Chicago sit-ins “Second Emancipation Proclamation” Meredith enrollment, Ole Miss riot “Segregation now, segregation forever” Stand in the Schoolhouse Door 1963 Birmingham campaign Letter from Birmingham Jail Children’s Crusade Birmingham riot 16th Street Baptist Church bombing John F. Kennedy’s Report to the American People on Civil Rights March on Washington “I Have a Dream” St. Augustine movement

1964–1968
• • • • Twenty-fourth Amendment Bloody Tuesday Freedom Summer workers’ murders Civil Rights Act of 1964 1965 Selma to Montgomery marches “How Long, Not Long” Voting Rights Act of 1965 Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections March Against Fear White House Conference on Civil Rights Chicago Freedom Movement/Chicago open housing movement Memphis Sanitation Strike King assassination funeral riots Poor People’s Campaign Civil Rights Act of 1968 Green v. County School Board of New Kent County
Activist
groups
• • Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights Atlanta Student Movement Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) Committee on Appeal for Human Rights Council for United Civil Rights Leadership Dallas County Voters League Deacons for Defense and Justice Georgia Council on Human Relations Highlander Folk School Leadership Conference on Civil Rights Montgomery Improvement Association Nashville Student Movement NAACP Youth Council Northern Student Movement National Council of Negro Women National Urban League Operation Breadbasket Regional Council of Negro Leadership Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) Southern Regional Council Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) The Freedom Singers Wednesdays in Mississippi Women’s Political Council

Activists
• Ralph Abernathy Victoria Gray Adams Zev Aelony Mathew Ahmann William G. Anderson Gwendolyn Armstrong Arnold Aronson Ella Baker Marion Barry Daisy Bates Harry Belafonte James Bevel Claude Black Gloria Blackwell Randolph Blackwell Unita Blackwell Ezell Blair Jr. Joanne Bland Julian Bond Joseph E. Boone William Holmes Borders Amelia Boynton Raylawni Branch Ruby Bridges Aurelia Browder H. Rap Brown Guy Carawan Stokely Carmichael Johnnie Carr James Chaney J. L. Chestnut Colia Lafayette Clark Ramsey Clark Septima Clark Xernona Clayton Eldridge Cleaver Kathleen Neal Cleaver Charles E. Cobb Jr. Annie Lee Cooper Dorothy Cotton Claudette Colvin Vernon Dahmer Jonathan Daniels Joseph DeLaine Dave Dennis Annie Devine Patricia Stephens Due Charles Evers Medgar Evers Myrlie Evers-Williams Chuck Fager James Farmer Walter E. Fauntroy James Forman Marie Foster Golden Frinks Andrew Goodman Fred Gray Jack Greenberg Dick Gregory Lawrence Guyot Prathia Hall Fannie Lou Hamer William E. Harbour Vincent Harding Dorothy Height Lola Hendricks Aaron Henry Oliver Hill Donald L. Hollowell James Hood Myles Horton Zilphia Horton T. R. M. Howard Ruby Hurley Jesse Jackson Jimmie Lee Jackson Richie Jean Jackson T. J. Jemison Esau Jenkins Barbara Rose Johns Vernon Johns Frank Minis Johnson Clarence Jones Matthew Jones Vernon Jordan Tom Kahn Clyde Kennard A. D. King C.B. King Coretta Scott King Martin Luther King Jr. Martin Luther King Sr. Bernard Lafayette James Lawson Bernard Lee Sanford R. Leigh Jim Letherer Stanley Levison John Lewis Viola Liuzzo Z. Alexander Looby Joseph Lowery Clara Luper Malcolm X Mae Mallory Vivian Malone Thurgood Marshall Benjamin Mays Franklin McCain Charles McDew Ralph McGill Floyd McKissick Joseph McNeil James Meredith William Ming Jack Minnis Amzie Moore Douglas E. Moore William Lewis Moore Irene Morgan Bob Moses William Moyer Elijah Muhammad Diane Nash Charles Neblett Edgar Nixon Jack O’Dell James Orange Rosa Parks James Peck Charles Person Homer Plessy Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Fay Bellamy Powell Al Raby Lincoln Ragsdale A. Philip Randolph George Raymond Jr. Bernice Johnson Reagon Cordell Reagon James Reeb Frederick D. Reese Gloria Richardson David Richmond Bernice Robinson Jo Ann Robinson Bayard Rustin Bernie Sanders Michael Schwerner Cleveland Sellers Charles Sherrod Alexander D. Shimkin Fred Shuttlesworth Modjeska Monteith Simkins Glenn E. Smiley A. Maceo Smith Kelly Miller Smith Mary Louise Smith Maxine Smith Ruby Doris Smith-Robinson Charles Kenzie Steele Hank Thomas Dorothy Tillman A. P. Tureaud Hartman Turnbow Albert Turner C. T. Vivian Wyatt Tee Walker Hollis Watkins Walter Francis White Roy Wilkins Hosea Williams Kale Williams Robert F. Williams Andrew Young Whitney Young Sammy Younge Jr. James Zwerg

Influences
• • • Nonviolence Padayatra Sermon on the Mount Mohandas K. Gandhi Ahimsa Satyagraha The Kingdom of God is Within You Frederick Douglass W. E. B. Du Bois
Related
• • • • • Jim Crow laws Plessy v. Ferguson Separate but equal Buchanan v. Warley Hocutt v. Wilson Sweatt v. Painter Heart of Atlanta Motel, Inc. v. United States Katzenbach v. McClung Loving v. Virginia Fifth Circuit Four Brown Chapel Holt Street Baptist Church Edmund Pettus Bridge March on Washington Movement African-American churches attacked Journey of Reconciliation Freedom Songs “Kumbaya” “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize” “Oh, Freedom” “This Little Light of Mine” “We Shall Not Be Moved” “We Shall Overcome” Spring Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence” Watts riots Voter Education Project 1960s counterculture In popular culture King Memorial Birmingham Civil Rights National Monument Freedom Riders National Monument Civil Rights Memorial

Noted
historians

• Taylor Branch Clayborne Carson John Dittmer Michael Eric Dyson Chuck Fager Adam Fairclough David Garrow David Halberstam Vincent Harding Steven F. Lawson Doug McAdam Diane McWhorter Charles M. Payne Timothy Tyson Akinyele Umoja Movement photographers
[hide]

This page was last edited on 17 October 2017, at 07:10.

Rene Dubos

Rene Dubos made a lasting impression on me. Reading his books and essays, I recall even today his humanism, optimism, and his insistence on localism.

He held the highest rank in the field of microbiology, but what I remember most are his writings on environmentalism.

CREDIT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/René_Dubos

René Dubos
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

René Jules Dubos

Born
20 February 1901
Saint-Brice-sous-Forêt, France[1]
Died
20 February 1982 (aged 81)
New York, New York, U.S.
Nationality
French-born naturalized American
Fields
Microbiology
Institutions
The Rockefeller University (formerly The Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research)
Alma mater
Rutgers University
Known for
Isolation and first successful testing of natural antibiotics
Coining the phrase “Think globally, act locally”
Notable awards
E. Mead Johnson Award (1941)
Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research (1948)
Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction (1969)
Cullum Geographical Medal (1975)
Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement (1976)
René Jules Dubos (February 20, 1901 – February 20, 1982) was a French-born American microbiologist, experimental pathologist, environmentalist, humanist, and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction for his book So Human An Animal.[2] He is credited for having made famous Jacques Ellul’s environmental maxim, “Think globally, act locally” (penser global, agir local).[3]

Dubos devoted most of his professional life to the empirical study of microbial diseases and to the analysis of the environmental and social factors that affect the welfare of humans. His pioneering research in isolating antibacterial substances from certain soil microorganisms led to the discovery of major antibiotics. He performed groundbreaking research and wrote extensively on a number of subjects, including tuberculosis, pneumonia, and the mechanisms of acquired immunity, natural susceptibility, and resistance to infection. Aside from a period from 1942 to 1944 when he was George Fabyan Professor of Comparative Pathology and professor of tropical medicine at Harvard Medical School and Harvard School of Public Health, his scientific career was spent entirely at The Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, later renamed The Rockefeller University.

In later years, Dubos explored the interplay of environmental forces and the physical, mental and spiritual development of mankind. The main tenets of his humanistic philosophy were: global problems are conditioned by local circumstances and choices, social evolution enables us to rethink human actions and change direction to promote an ecologically balanced environment, the future is optimistic since human life and nature are resilient and we have become increasingly aware of the dangers inherent in natural forces and human activities, and we can benefit from our successes and apply the lessons learned to solving other contemporary environmental problems.

Dubos is often attributed as the author of the popular maxim “Think Globally, Act Locally” that refers to the argument that global environmental problems can turn into action only by considering ecological, economic, and cultural differences of our local surroundings. This motto appeared for the first time in 1978, six years after Dubos served as advisor to the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment.[4] In 1979, Dubos suggested that ecological consciousness should begin at home. He urged creation of a world order in which “natural and social units maintain or recapture their identity, yet interplay with each other through a rich system of communications”. In the 1980s, Dubos held to his thoughts on acting locally, and felt that issues involving the environment must be dealt with in their “unique physical, climatic, and cultural contexts”. Dubos’ approach to building a resilient and constructive relationship between people and the Earth continues to resonate.[5]

For the academic years 1963–1964 and 1964–1965, he was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies of Wesleyan University.[6] He served as chairman of the trustees of the René Dubos Center for Human Environment, a non-profit education and research organization that was dedicated in his honor in 1980. The mission of the center, which was co-founded by William and Ruth Eblen, is to “assist the general public and decision-makers in formulating policies for the resolution of environmental problems and the creation of environmental values.” Dubos remained actively involved with the Center until his death in 1982. He also served on the board of trustees of Science Service, now known as Society for Science & the Public, from 1949 to 1952.

Early life and career[edit]
Dubos was born in Saint-Brice-sous-Forêt, France, on February 20, 1901, and grew up in Hénonville, another small Île-de-France farming village north of Paris. His parents operated butcher shops in each of these villages.[7] He attended high school and the National Institute of Agronomy in Paris, and he received a Ph.D. from Rutgers University in 1927.[1] Dubos began his career in microbiology in 1927, when he joined Oswald Avery’s laboratory[8] at The Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research. Avery was looking for a microbe that could break down the polysaccharide capsule of a deadly strain of bacterial pneumonia in the same way that soil bacteria digested decaying organic matter in the woods. Dubos identified a bacterium that secreted an enzyme that broke down polysaccharide.[9] In 1939, with the help of Rockefeller Institute biochemist Rollin Hotchkiss, Dubos isolated the antibacterial agents tyrothricin and gramicidin from the bacterium Bacillus brevis that killed or inhibited Gram-positive bacteria and tested their bacterial, chemical, and clinical properties. These antibiotics remain in limited use today. In 1942, before antibiotics were in general use, Dubos warned that bacterial resistance should be expected.[10]
In 1948, Dubos shared the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award with Selman Waksman for “their achievement in studies of the antibiotic properties of soil bacteria”.[11] A member of the National Academy of Sciences, he served as an editor of the Journal of Experimental Medicine from 1946 to 1972.
Legacy[edit]
• In 1998, the René Dubos Center for Human Environments donated a large portion of its environmental library and archives to Pace University. The collection consists of works by Dubos as well as those of other leading environmental scholars, some of which have been annotated by Dubos himself. According to Robert Chapman, professor of philosophy and coordinator of Pace’s Environmental Studies Program, “Pace now has many of Dubos’s own research books from the Rockefeller University, and this means that we can not only look at his writing, but we can also do an analysis of where his ideas come from and what influenced him.”
• In 1979, the René Dubos Center purchased 30 acres (120,000 m2) of land in North Castle, New York, with donations from foundations. As a condition of the purchase it agreed to keep the property in a natural state. Nevertheless, in 2002 it attempted to sell the land to developer Michael Cappelli, who planned to develop luxury homes there. The Center filed legal action in 2007 to attempt to complete this transaction; however, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo opposed the move, and the State Supreme Court ruled against the Center in that year. In 2009, the controversy was resolved when the Center agreed to sell the land to the village of Mount Kisco, New York.[12]
Awards and honors[edit]
• Recipient of the International Center in New York’s Award of Excellence.
Books[edit]
• The Bacterial Cell in its Relation to Problems of Virulence, Immunity and Chemotherapy, 1945, Harvard University Press
• Louis Pasteur, Free Lance of Science, 1950, 1960, Charles Scribner’s Sons, Da Capo Press 1986 reprint of 1960 edition: ISBN 0-306-80262-7
• The White Plague: Tuberculosis, Man, and Society, 1952, Little, Brown, and Company, Rutgers University Press 1987: ISBN 0-8135-1224-7
• Biochemical Determinants of Microbial Diseases, 1954, Harvard University Press
• Man, Medicine, and Environment, 1968, Praeger
• Mirage of Health: Utopias, Progress & Biological Change, 1959, Rutgers University Press 1987: ISBN 0-8135-1260-3
• Pasteur and Modern Science, 1960, Anchor Books, American Society of Microbiology edition with new chapter by Thomas D. Brock, 1998: ISBN 1-55581-144-2
• The Dreams of Reason: Science and Utopias, 1961 George B. Pegram lectures, Columbia University Press
• The Unseen World, 1962, The Rockefeller Institute Press
• The Torch of Life: Continuity in Living Experience, 1962, Simon and Schuster, Touchstone 1970 reprint: ISBN 0-671-20469-6
• Man Adapting, 1966, Yale University Press, ISBN 0-300-00437-0, enlarged edition 1980: ISBN 0-300-02581-5
• So Human an Animal: How We Are Shaped by Surroundings and Events, 1968, Scribner Book Company, Transaction Publishers 1998 edition: ISBN 0-7658-0429-8 (won the 1969 Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction)
• Reason Awake, 1970, Columbia University Press, ISBN 0-231-03181-5
• Only One Earth: The Care and Maintenance of a Small Planet, 1972, coauthored with Barbara Ward and United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, W W Norton & Co, ISBN 0-393-06391-7
• A God Within, 1973, Scribner, ISBN 0-684-13506-X
• Of Human Diversity, 1974, Clark University Press, ISBN 0-914206-24-9
• Beast or Angel: Choices That Make Us Human, 1974, Scribner, hardcover: ISBN 0-684-17608-4, paperback 1984: ISBN 0-684-14436-0
• The Professor, the Institute, and DNA: Oswald T. Avery, His Life and Scientific Achievements, 1976, Paul & Company, ISBN 0-87470-022-1
• The Wooing of Earth, 1980, Scribner, ISBN 0-684-16501-5
• Quest: Reflections on Medicine, Science, and Humanity, 1980, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, ISBN 0-15-175705-4
• Celebrations of Life, 1981, McGraw Hill, ISBN 0-07-017893-3
• The World of René Dubos: A Collection from His Writings, 1990, Henry Holt & Co, ISBN 0-8050-1360-1
As editor[edit]
• LIFE Science Library, including authorship of one of its 26 volumes: Health and Disease (1965), with Maya Pines

Collected papers[edit]

The collected papers of Dubos from 1927–1982 including correspondence, lecture notes, book and article drafts, laboratory notebooks, photographs, audio and video cassettes, and films, are stored at the Rockefeller Archive Center.
References[edit]
1 ^ Jump up to: 
a b Montgomery, Paul L. (February 21, 1982). “Rene Dubos, Scientist And Writer, Dead”. The New York Times.
2 Jump up 
^ “The Pulitzer Prizes: General Nonfiction”. pulitzer.org. Retrieved 2014-10-07.
3 Jump up 
^ “Quotes Uncovered: The Real McCoy and Acting Locally”. Freakonomics. Retrieved 2015-06-15.
4 Jump up 
^ Moberg, Carol L. (2005). René Dubos, Friend of the Good Earth. ASM Press. pp. 160–163. ISBN 1-55581-340-2.
5 Jump up 
^ Revkin, Andrew C. (June 6, 2011). “A ‘Despairing Optimist’ Considered Anew”. The New York Times.
6 Jump up 
^ “Guide to the Center for Advanced Studies and Records, 1958–1969”. Wesleyan University. Retrieved 2014-10-07.
7 Jump up 
^ Hirsch, James G.; Moberg, Carol L. (1989). “René Jules Dubos”. Biographical Memoirs, Volume 58. National Academies Press.
8 Jump up 
^ Dubos, René (November 1, 1956). “Oswald Theodore Avery, 1877–1955”. Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society. 2: 35–48. doi:10.1098/rsbm.1956.0003.
9 Jump up 
^ “Gramicidin: Ushering in the Scientific Era of Antibiotic Discovery and Therapy”. Rockefeller University Hospital. Retrieved 2014-10-07.
10 Jump up 
^ Dubos, René (1942). “Microbiology”. Annual Review of Biochemistry. 11: 659–678. doi:10.1146/annurev.bi.11.070142.003303.
11 Jump up 
^ “1948 Winners”. laskerfoundation.org. Retrieved 2014-10-07.
12 Jump up 
^ “Attorney General Cuomo Approves Sale of Rene Dubos Property to Town of Mount Kisco, Protecting Open Space and Water Supply” (Press release). New York State Office of the Attorney General. June 4, 2009. Retrieved 2014-10-07.
External links[edit]
• Works by or about René Dubos in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• National Academy of Sciences Biographical Memoir
• Frank Ryan, M.D., The Forgotten Plague: How the Battle Against Tuberculosis Was Won and Lost, 1992, Little Brown and Company, ISBN 0-316-76380-2 includes chapter on Dubos, puts his work in context of fight against TB.
René Dubos, Of Human Nature (1968)

NEST Smart Home Update

I have been tracking Google’s NEST for awhile now. It’s the best example I know of a learning system for the home. The latest is …. it is still the best!

================
CREDIT: http://thewirecutter.com/reviews/the-best-thermostat/

We spent more than a month trying five popular smart thermostats—testing the hardware, their accompanying mobile apps, and their integrations with various smart-home systems—and the third-generation Nest remains our pick. Five years after the Nest’s debut, a handful of bona fide competitors approach it in style and functionality, but the Nest Learning Thermostat remains the leader. It’s still the easiest, most intuitive thermostat we tested, offering the best combination of style and substance.

Last Updated: November 10, 2016
We’ve added our review of Ecobee’s new Ecobee3 Lite, and we’ve updated our thoughts on HomeKit integration following the launch of Apple’s Home app. We’ve also included details on Nest’s new Eco setting and color options, a brief look at the upcoming Lyric T5, and a clarification regarding the use of a C wire for the Emerson Sensi.

The Nest works well on its own or integrated with other smart-home products. Its software and apps are solid and elegant, too, and it does a really good job of keeping your home at a comfortable temperature with little to no input from you. Plus, if you want to change the temperature yourself, you can easily do so from your smartphone or computer, or with your voice via Google or an Amazon Echo. All of that means never having to get up from a cozy spot on the couch to mess with the thermostat. While the competition is catching up, none of the other devices we tested could match the Nest’s smarts. The expansion of the Works with Nest smart-home ecosystem and the introduction of Home/Away Assist have kept the Nest in the lead by fine-tuning those smart capabilities. The recent hardware update merely added a larger screen and a choice of clock interfaces, but the ongoing software improvements (which apply to all three generations of the product) have helped keep the Nest in its position as the frontrunner in this category without leaving its early adopters out in the cold.

Runner-up

Ecobee3
Not as sleek or intuitive as the Nest, but it supports Apple’s HomeKit and uses stand-alone remote sensors to register temperature in different parts of a house, making it an option for large homes with weak HVAC systems.
The Ecobee3’s support for remote sensors makes it appealing if your thermostat isn’t in the best part of your house to measure the temperature. If you have a large, multistory house with a single-zone HVAC system, you can have big temperature differences between rooms. With Ecobee3’s add-on sensors (you get one with the unit and can add up to 32 more), the thermostat uses the sensors’ occupancy detectors to match the target temperature in occupied rooms, rather than just wherever the thermostat is installed. However, it doesn’t have the level of intelligence of the Nest, or that model’s retro cool look (which even the Honeywell Lyric takes a good stab at). Its black, rounded-rectangle design and touchscreen interface have a more modern feel, it looks a bit like someone mounted a smartphone app on your wall.

Ecobee3 Lite
Ecobee’s new Lite model is a great budget option. It doesn’t have any occupancy sensors or remote temperature sensors, but it would work well for a smaller home invested in the Apple ecosystem.
For a cheaper smart thermostat with most of the important features of the more expensive models, we suggest the Ecobee3 Lite. This budget version of the Ecobee3 lacks the remote sensors and occupancy sensors of its predecessor but retains the programming and scheduling features, and like the main Ecobee3, it works with a variety of smart-home systems, including HomeKit, Alexa, SmartThings, Wink, and IFTTT. However, the lack of an occupancy sensor means you’ll have to manually revert it to its prescheduled state anytime you use Alexa, Siri, or any other integration to change its temperature.

real people should not fill this in and expect good things – do not remove this or risk form bot signups

Table of contents
Why a smart thermostat?
Smart-home integration
Who this is for
The C-wire conundrum
Multizone systems
How we picked and tested
Our pick
Who else likes our pick
Flaws but not deal breakers
Potential privacy issues
The next best thing (for larger homes)
Budget pick
The competition
What to look forward to
Wrapping it up

Why a smart thermostat?
A smart thermostat isn’t just convenient: Used wisely, it can save energy (and money), and it offers the potential for some cool integrations. If you upgrade to any smart thermostat after years with a basic one, the first and most life-changing difference will be the ability to control it remotely, from your phone, on your tablet, or with your voice. No more getting up in the middle of the night to turn up the AC. No dashing back into the house to lower the heat before you go on errands (or vacation). No coming home to a sweltering apartment—you just fire up the AC when you’re 10 minutes away, or even better, have your thermostat turn itself on in anticipation of your arrival.
Technically, thermostats have been “smart” since the first time a manufacturer realized that such devices could be more than a mercury thermometer and a metal dial. For years, the Home Depots of the world were full of plastic rectangles that owed a lot to the digital clock: They’d let you dial in ideal heating and cooling temperatures, and maybe even set different temperatures for certain times of the day and particular days of the week.
The thermostat landscape changed with the introduction of the Nest in 2011 by Nest Labs, a company led by Tony Fadell, generally credited to be one of the major forces behind Apple’s iPod. (Google acquired Nest Labs in 2014; Fadell has since moved on to an advisory position at Alphabet, Google’s parent company.) The original Nest was a stylish metal-and-glass Wi-Fi–enabled device, with a bright color screen and integrated smartphone apps—in other words, a device that combined style and functionality in a way never before seen in the category.
The Nest got a lot of publicity, especially when you consider that it’s a thermostat. Within a few months, Nest Labs was slapped with a patent suit by Honeywell, maker of numerous competing thermostats.
But once the Nest was out there, it was hard to deny that the thermostat world had needed a kick in the pants. And five years later, not only have the traditional plastic beige rectangles gained Wi-Fi features and smartphone apps, but other companies have also entered the high-feature, high-design thermostat market, including the upstart Ecobee and the old standards Honeywell, Emerson, and Carrier.
The fact is, a cheap plastic thermostat with basic time programming—the kind people have had for two decades—will do a pretty good job of keeping your house at the right temperature without wasting a lot of money, so long as you put in the effort to program it and remember to shut it off. But that’s the thing: Most people don’t.
These new thermostats are smart because they spend time doing the thinking that most people just don’t do.
“The majority of people who have a programmable thermostat don’t program it, or maybe they program it once and never update it when things change,” said Bronson Shavitz, a Chicago-area contractor who has installed and serviced hundreds of heating and cooling systems over the years.

Smart thermostats spend time doing the thinking that most people just don’t do, turning themselves off when nobody’s home, targeting temperatures only in occupied rooms, and learning your household schedule through observation. Plus, with their sleek chassis and integrated smartphone apps, these thermostats are fun to use.

Nest Labs claims that a learning thermostat (well, its learning thermostat) saves enough energy to pay for itself in as little as two years.
Since the introduction of the Nest, energy companies have begun offering rebates and incentives for their customers to switch to a smart thermostat, and some have even developed their own devices and apps and now offer them for free or at a greatly reduced price to encourage customers to switch. Clearly, these devices provide a larger benefit than simple convenience. Because they can do a better job of scheduling the heating and cooling of your house than you can, they save money and energy.

Smart-home integration
Among the useful features of smart thermostats is the ability to work as part of a larger smart-home system and to keep developing even after you’ve purchased one. For example, many of the thermostats we tested now integrate with the Amazon Echo, a Wi-Fi–connected speaker that can control many smart-home devices. You can speak commands to Alexa, Echo’s personal assistant, to adjust your climate control. This function came to the thermostats via a software update, so a smart thermostat purchased last year has the same functionality as one bought yesterday.
These over-the-air software updates, while sometimes known to cause issues, are a key feature of smart devices. Shelling out $250 for a thermostat that has the potential to become better as it sits on your wall helps cushion some of the sticker shock. The Nest earns particularly high marks in this area, because whether you bought one in 2011 or 2016, you get the same advanced learning algorithms and smart integrations.
Additionally, all of the thermostats we tested work with one or more smart-home hubs such as SmartThings and Wink, or within a Web-enabled ecosystem like Amazon’s Alexa or IFTTT (If This Then That). The Nest also has its own developer program, Works with Nest, which integrates the company’s thermostat and other products directly with a long and growing list of devices including smart lights, appliances, locks, cars, shades, and garage door openers. This means you can add your thermostat to different smart scenarios and have it react to other actions in your home: It could set itself to Away mode and lock your Kevo smart door lock when you leave your house, for instance, or it could turn up the heat when your Chamberlain MyQ garage door opener activates. These ecosystems are continually growing, meaning the interactions your thermostat is capable of are growing as well (sometimes with the purchase of additional hardware).
With the release of the Home app for HomeKit, Apple’s smart-home unification plans have taken a bigger step toward fruition. While the devices are still limited (a hardware update is required for compatibility), you can now create scenes (linking devices together) and control them from outside the home on an iPad; previously you had to use a third-generation Apple TV. This change increases the number of people who will see HomeKit as a viable smart-home option. Even without an iPad permanently residing in your home, you can still talk to and operate HomeKit products using Siri on your iPhone or iPad while you are at home. The system works in the same way Alexa does, and it’s actually a little more pleasant to use than shouting across the room.
The Ecobee3, Ecobee 3 Lite and Honeywell Lyric (released January 2016) are all HomeKit compatible, and can communicate with other HomeKit devices to create scenes such as “I’m Home,” to trigger your thermostat to set to your desired temp and your HomeKit-compatible lights to come on.
Google now offers its own voice-activated speaker similar to Amazon’s Echo, the Google Home. The Home, which integrates with Nest as well as IFTTT, SmartThings, and Philips Hue, allows you to control your Nest thermostat via voice.

Who this is for
Get a smart thermostat if you’re interested in saving more energy and exerting more control over your home environment. If you like the prospect of turning on your heater on your way home from work, or having your home’s temperature adjust intelligently, a smart thermostat will suit you. And, well, these devices just look cooler than those plastic rectangles of old.
Get a smart thermostat if you’re interested in saving more energy and exerting more control over your home environment.
If you already have a smart thermostat, such as a first- or second-generation Nest, you don’t need to upgrade. And if you have a big, complex home-automation system that includes a thermostat, you may prefer the interoperability of your current setup to the intelligence and elegance of a Nest or similar thermostat.
If you don’t care much about slick design and attractive user interfaces, you can find cheaper thermostats (available from companies such as Honeywell) that offer Wi-Fi connectivity and some degree of scheduling flexibility. The hardware is dull and interfaces pedestrian, but they’ll do the job and save you a few bucks.
The devices we looked at are designed to be attached to existing heating and cooling systems. Most manufacturers now offer Wi-Fi thermostats of their own, and while they’re generally not as stylish as the models we looked at, they have the advantage of being designed specifically for that manufacturer’s equipment. That offers some serious benefits, including access to special features and a deep understanding of how specific equipment behaves that a more general thermostat can’t have.

The C-wire conundrum
One major caveat with all smart thermostats is the need for a C wire, or “common wire,” which supplies AC power from your furnace to connected devices such as thermostats. Smart thermostats are essentially small computers that require power to operate—even more so if you want to keep their screens illuminated all the time. If your heating and cooling system is equipped with a C wire, you won’t have any concerns about power. The problem is, common wires are not very common in houses.
In the absence of a C wire, both the Nest and the Honeywell Lyric can charge themselves by stealing power from other wires, but that can cause serious side effects, according to contractor Bronson Shavitz. He told us that old-school furnaces are generally resilient enough to provide power for devices such as the Nest and the Lyric, but that the high-tech circuit boards on newer models can be more prone to failure when they’re under stress from the tricks the Nest and Lyric use to charge themselves without a common wire.
Installing a C wire requires hiring an electrician and will add about $150 to your costs. The Ecobee3 includes an entire wiring kit to add a C wire if you don’t have one (for the previous version of this guide, reviewer Jason Snell spent about two hours rewiring his heater to accommodate the wiring kit). The Emerson Sensi is the only thermostat we tested that claims not to need a C wire, but it too draws power from whichever system is not in currently in use (for example, the heating system if you’re using the AC). This means that if you have a heat- or air-only system, you will need a C wire.
Note: If the power handling is not correct, the damage to your system can be significant. The expense of replacing a furnace or AC board, plus the cost of professional installation, will probably outweigh the convenience or energy savings of a smart thermostat. Nest addresses the power requirements of its thermostat, including whether a common wire is necessary, in detail on its website, so if you’re unsure whether your system is suited for it, check out this page for C wire information, as well as this page for system compatibility questions and this page for solutions to wiring problems.

Multizone systems
If you have more than one zone in your HVAC system, you will need to purchase a separate smart thermostat for each zone. Currently, while all of the smart thermostats we tested are compatible with multizone systems, none can control more than one zone. Even though the Ecobee3 supports remote sensors, those feed only a single thermostat—so if you want more zones, you’ll still need separate thermostats, with their own sensors. However, the Ecobee3 is the only thermostat we tested that allows you to put more than one thermostat into a group so that you can program them to act identically, if you choose.

How we picked and tested

We put these five smart thermostats through their paces to bring you our top pick. Photo: Michael Hession
By eliminating proprietary and basic Wi-Fi–enabled thermostats, we ended up with six finalists: the third-generation Nest, Ecobee’s Ecobee3 and Ecobee3 Lite, Honeywell’s second-generation Lyric, Emerson’s Sensi Wi-Fi thermostat, and Carrier’s Cor. We installed each model ourselves and ran them for three to 10 days in routine operation. We did our testing in a 2,200-square-foot, two-story South Carolina home, running a two-zone HVAC system with an electric heat pump and forced air.
For each thermostat, our testing considered ease of installation and setup, ease of adjusting the temperature, processes for setting a schedule and using smartphone app features, multizone control capabilities, and smart-home interoperability.

Tesla and Energy Storage

CREDIT: Guardian Story on Tesla and Energy Storage

Tesla moves beyond electric cars with new California battery farm

From the road, the close to 400 white industrial boxes packed into 1.5 acres of barren land in Ontario, California, a little more than 40 miles from downtown Los Angeles, look like standard electrical equipment. They’re surrounded by a metal fence, stand on concrete pads and sit under long electrical lines.

But take a closer look and you’ll notice the bright red coloring and gray logo of electric car company Tesla on the sides. And inside the boxes are thousands of battery cells – the same ones that are used in Tesla’s electric cars – made by the company in its massive $5bn Tesla Gigafactory outside of Reno, Nevada.

This spot, located at the Mira Loma substation of Southern California Edison, hosts the biggest battery farm Tesla has built for a power company. Southern California Edison will use the battery farm, which has been operating since December and is one of the biggest in the world, to store energy and meet spikes in demand – like on hot summer afternoons when buildings start to crank up the air conditioning.

Tesla’s project has a capacity of 20 megawatts and is designed to discharge 80-megawatt hours of electricity in four-hour periods. It contains enough batteries to run about 1,000 Tesla cars, and the equivalent energy to supply power to 15,000 homes for four hours. The company declined to disclose the project’s cost.

The project marks an important point in Tesla’s strategy to expand beyond the electric car business. Developing battery packs is a core expertise for the company, which is designing packs for homes, businesses and utilities. It markets them partly as a way to store solar electricity for use after sundown, a pitch that works well for states with a booming solar energy market such as California.

Battery systems built for power companies can serve more than one purpose. A utility can avoid blackouts by charging them up when its natural gas power plants, or solar and wind farms, produce more electricity than needed, and draw from them when the power plants aren’t able to keep up with demand.

Edison and other California utilities hired Tesla and a few other battery farm builders after an important natural gas reservoir near Los Angeles, called Aliso Canyon, closed following a huge leak and massive environmental disaster in late 2015. The leak forced thousands of people in nearby neighborhoods to evacuate. It also left utilities worried about how they’d meet the peak electricity demands of coming summers if they weren’t able to dip into the natural gas storage whenever they need fuel to produce power. They couldn’t always get natural gas shipment from other suppliers quick enough to meet a sharp rise in electricity consumption.

As a result, the California Public Utilities Commission approved 100 megawatts of energy storage projects for both Southern California Edison and also San Diego Gas & Electric. The commission also asked for the projects to be built quickly, before the end of 2016.

Other energy storage projects that have been built since include a 37.5-megawatt project in San Diego County by AES Energy Storage, which used lithium-ion batteries from Samsung. AES has completed the project, which is going through the commissioning phase. AES also plans to build a 100-megawatt project for Southern California Edison in Long Beach in 2020.
Even before the Aliso Canyon disaster, the commission had already recognized the benefit of using energy storage to manage supply and demand and expected it to become an important component in the state’s plan to replace fossil fuel energy with renewables. The commission, which requires the state’s three big utilities to add more wind and solar energy to their supplies over time, also set a statement energy storage target of 1,325 megawatts by 2020.
Surrounded by rows of batteries at a ribbon-cutting ceremony at the project on Monday, Southern California Edison’s CEO Kevin Payne said the Tesla project is important because “it validates that energy storage can be part of the energy mix now” and is “a great reminder of how fast technology is changing the electric power industry”.

This latest crop of energy storage projects use a new generation of lithium-ion batteries. Historically, batteries were too expensive for energy storage, but their prices have dropped dramatically in recent years, thanks to their mass production by companies such as Panasonic, Tesla and Samsung.
Companies that buy lithium-ion batteries have been reporting drops in prices of 70% over the past two years. Tesla has said it plans to lower its battery prices by 30% by expanding production inside its Gigafactory.
At the event on Monday, Tesla’s co-founder and chief technology officer JB Straubel said: “Storage has been missing on the grid since it was invented.”

Tesla is counting on the energy storage market as an important source of revenue and built its giant factory with that in mind.
The company believes its expertise in engineering and building electric cars sets itself apart from other battery farm developers. Tesla has been developing battery packs for a decade and improved the technology that manages the batteries temperatures, which can be high enough to pose a fire risk.
Overheating is a well known problem for lithium-ion batteries, which require insulating materials and software to keep them running cool. A battery farm built next to a wind farm in Hawaii by a now-bankrupt company caught fire in 2012 and temporarily put a dampener on the energy storage market.
Tesla has been building another battery farm on the Hawaiian island of Kauai, and has projects in Connecticut, North Carolina, New Zealand and the UK.
The company is looking for opportunities to build battery farms outside of California, including the East Coast and countries such as Germany, Australia and Japan. Tesla co-founder and CEO Elon Musk has said in the past that the company’s energy storage business could one day be bigger than its car business.