About the Author
Robert Koslowsky was born in Lexington, Missouri in the 1950s. He moved with his parents at an early age to Canada where he was educated. He graduated from the University of Manitoba with a degree in Electrical Engineering in 1981.
Rob gained valuable work experience with Petro-Canada* on the Athabasca Tar Sands project. He also spent seventeen years in the corporate high technology field of optical fiber transmission with Nortel in both Canada and the United States.
| Rob and his early mentor Douglas J. MacGregor installed and commissioned the FD-3 fiber optic transmission system equipment from Regina to Yorkton for SaskTel in the early 1980s as part of their broadband initiative. |  |
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 | Rob worked along the Amtrak rails splicing singlemode optical fiber for MCI. Here he is jokingly posing to cleave the fibers using train power. |
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Rob left this environment for the entrepreneurial start-up world in Northern California. He was Marketing Director for the Cerent Corporation based in Petaluma and drove the introduction of the Multi-service Provisioning Platforms (MSPPs) that have become standard transmission solutions in the first decade of the 21st century.
 | Rob drove the company and product launch of the Cerent 454 at Supercomm 1999 in Atlanta. |
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Cerent was acquired by Cisco Systems and Rob completed his commitment to introduce the complementary MSSP and MSTP solutions that gained market acceptance in the first half of the decade.
Rob studied at Merton College in Oxford in 2003 and published his first book in 2004. Among the challenges of promoting the book with book signings and television interviews, he found time in 2005 to take on the role of VP Marketing for Caeren Systems, a Petaluma-based WiMAX startup company. After that Rob provided consulting support in 2006 to both a telecom startup called eLocate and an energy start-up called PV Solutions (now known as Enphase Energy). 2007 arrived and Rob provided marketing support to the Chief Marketing Officer of Cyan Optics, a fiber optics-based startup. These projects have kept him technically current in a number of diverse fields of technology. In 2008, Rob took on additional responsibilities as Officer of the California's Writers Club and a Member of the Board of Directors of the University of Manitoba Foundation USA, Inc.
Rob's writings are based on his experiences and related to a World Perspective through 21st Century Eyes. Rob’s first book is related to science and imagination which is currently being published. His second book is related to business and innovation which is currently being written and plans for a third book are related to Life and Attitude.
He continues to reside with his wife and family in Sonoma County, California and participates in a variety of multi-disciplinary conferences and seminars. Rob is a member of the IEEE,
He recently took on the role of Newsletter Editor for the Redwood Branch of the California Writers Club and a board member to the University of Manitoba Foundation USA. Rob continues to travel, consult and study.
*whatever happened to the idea of preheating oil sand with electric or magnetic fields; an engineering project that Rob worked on more than 20 years ago?
Scroll down to find out!
Rob's Wife has Just Released Her First Book
Yvonne wants to show children the importance of physical education while making reading a fun and enjoyable experience."Tommy the Turtle takes a Tumble" is the story of how everyone can be physically active, whether short or tall, big or little, or something in between.
http://tommytheturtle.bravehost.com/index.html
The important message for readers is to participate in those physical activities they most enjoy.
"Tommy the Turtle takes a Tumble" is an educational children's book written in a fun and humorous way with wonderful illustrations to convey the story.
International Residents Order through amazon.com Here!
Recent Publications
Sixteen Essays PublishedKoslowsky's essays for the Research and Discovery: Landmarks and Pioneers in American Science were published by Sharpe Press in February 2008.
This book set expands upon innovators such as Edwin Hubble and Murray Gell-Mann and innovations such as the laser and the Mars rover, Pathfinder that are found in various forms in Rob's newsletter over the past three years. Russell Lawson was the editor.
Please let your local librarian know that this handy 3-volume reference set is now available.
New Short Story
In November 2007, Rob published his third short story, Death Finds a Way, The Dangers of Whooping Cough. Scroll down to the bottom of the page for more.
Six Essays Published
Koslowsky's contributions to the Encyclopedia of the Age of the Industrial Revolution: 1700-1920 was published by Greenwood Press in June 2007.
Christine Rider was the editor and she was a joy to work with. Please let your local librarian know that this handy two-volume reference set is now available.
Rob Responds to Questions About His First Book
Q - Have you always been interested in writing?A - Yes, I have always been passionate about writing. I believe this is because I love reading. Reading provides either the knowledge or an escape from day-to-day issues. It is intoxicating to fill your head with ideas and play with them as you create diffferent scenarios in your mind’s eye. I exercised by love of writing during my high tech career by authoring training courses, magazine articles, and toying with my book manuscript.
Q - Is technology a motivator for social change?
A - Definitely. Scientific innovation enables technological applications to solve practical problems facing humankind. Technology has delivered increased longevity and better shelter, food, and clothing. As each problem is addressed, our living standard is raised. With increasing energy consumption, the need for physical energy to do work is lessened and surplus energy for pursuing leisure is increased. Increasing leisure time has contributed to the rise in democracy, ubiquity of public education, and an incredible assortment of recreational pursuits. All of the underlying technological advances that have improved society do not change human nature, but they certainly do modify human behavior for the better.
Q - How did you come up this idea for the book?
A - I wanted to share my ideas about the three major themes of human experience from our ongoing biological evolution, our continuing cultural evolution, and the impact our current technological evolution is having on society.
These three themes have different timelines and any interaction among them are complete studies in and of themselves. Biological evolution takes hundreds of thousands of years and it is all about survival and adaptation. Cultural evolution takes place over centuries and defines how people interact and coexist. And technological evolution is on the order of years. It is a phase used to modify human behavior for both self-interest and the common good. The technological evolution has enabled per capita energy increases for society to self-organize around almost two hundred democracies worldwide to date.
Q - How does humanity better itself with scientific discovery?
A - Humankind betters itself when it applies science to solve practical problems. This is what engineering is all about. For example, steam engines replaced wind power and sails, and human muscle on ships. Electric power replaced steam engines in factories making industry safer for the workers and increasing productivity. And, optical fibers replaced copper wires in long distance communications for increased bandwidth, greater reach, and better performance. Each and every improvement leads to a more stable, fair, and rich society.
How are individuals adapting to a more technological society?
People are interacting with other people differently. In the past, people had many friends. Today, most people have very few friends. However, there are many acquaintances. Technology allows for less personal interaction and greater independence. The debate today is about whether this is better or worse for individuals and the new global society that is emerging as a result.
Q - Is acceleration of change beneficial?
A - Yes, indeed! Change encourages us to examine what we do and pushes us to modify our behaviors for the better. It is the acceleration of change, driven by technological innovation, that improves society. The twentieth century has been called the “People’s Century” for it was the time when authority was challenged on a global basis. The elite listened, to a greater or lesser degree, to its people and democracy flourished. Almost one hundred new democracies were established in the twentieth century while communism and facism was all but obliterated. Intimacy between leaders and citizens was strengthened, contributing to stability in society. The positive tension between technological change and cultural tradition is what gives today’s society its fairness and rich culture. The challenge for each individual is to integrate the elements of change that makes sense to him or her.
Demonstrating Power in Sport and Science
Here is the write-up on what Innovalight, Inc. and Barry Bonds shared in common on August 7, 2007. This article was recently submitted in an essay contest conducted by the California Writers Club.Just as Barry Bonds is hitting home runs out of AT&T Park in San Francisco these days, solar generating companies are hitting it out of the ballpark of innovation in Silicon Valley. August 7th was a special day for two reasons. In the sporting World, Bonds surpassed Hank Aaron’s major league homerun record of 755 as he rocketed number 756 out of the deepest part of the park. In the world of solar energy, Dr. Homer Antoniadis hit a homerun for innovation in the development of solar energy technology out of the depths of nano-sized silicon particles. To make sure this topic was no longer Greek to me, I took the opportunity to attend and deconstruct Antoniadis’s talk entitled "Low-Cost Solar Cells Exploiting Silicon Ink Technology" in Santa Clara.
The “low-cost solar cells” part is straightforward. For solar energy and its trademark crystalline panels to compete with traditional coal-fired or nuclear-powered energy sources, the lowest cost per watt needs to be achieved. To stimulate adoption of solar by business and residential consumers, various government agencies - Japan, Germany, and the State of California, for example - have been offering subsidies or rebates to overcome financial hurdles. Solar hasn’t been an economical provider of electricity in the past and such incentives are crucial for the solar market to survive. Initial applications included generating power for spacecraft in orbit and remote sensing stations on earth. The early adopters of solar for electricity were billed as “greenies” or “tree huggers,” owing to the fact that most were described as environmentalists or left-wing liberals who had shed the American world of capitalism and consumerism.
However, the realization of “low-cost” tends to strip away this perceived layer of dirty veneer, revealing a significant cost benefit for people to implement solar technology. The reduced up-front cost (subsidies) and the ability to generate excess power on many days and sell it back to the power utility (using a technique called grid-tie), provides personal energy independence. How American is that?
In addition, gaining kudos for doing one’s part in reducing the size of one’s carbon footprint makes for great conversation and bragging rights. Being part of the solution in reducing greenhouse gas emissions or just being “green” is now the latest status symbol. Even the mainstream media covers Hollywood stars like Cameron Diaz, who drive a Toyota Prius and Edward Norton, who promotes the use of solar energy, all claiming to do their part in lowering the carbon footprint. Even former politician, Al Gore, has become a media celebrity owing to his fight against global warming. The general public recognizes the value of solar energy to be a source of clean, electrical energy, a component in the process to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and a way to move society towards a sustainable existence with a reduced carbon footprint.
So far, so good. It is the “exploiting silicon ink technology” part of the talk that had me guessing, and I must confess, intrigued. What the heck could ink have to do with solar technology and how could silicon be liquefied in the first place? Numerous questions were swirling in my head. Either that or I was dizzy with confusion, since I’ve never heard of or seen a liquid solar panel before. As it turns out, the science of nanotechnology, when applied to particles of silicon, the most abundant element on earth besides oxygen, produces ink. Yes ink, just like the stuff we use in our home printers. I suspect this formulation is more expensive than the HP and Epson cartridges I tend to fumble with inside my inkjet printer. As applied to the world of power-generating solar panels, the trick is to understand that silicon ink is a tool used in the process of making solar panels. The ink is literally applied, like that in your printer to paper, to a substrate that provides the foundation for the solar cells. It is these solar cells that take the photons of light from the sun, convert then into electron-hole pairs, and steer them to either side of the solar cell as direct-current electricity. The ink-stained cells are then combined with others to produce the solid solar panel we are familiar with.
The science of nanotechnology compelled Innovalight, Inc. to develop a process to size and capture silicon particles on the order of two to twenty nanometers and suspend them in a liquid concoction. This ink is then used to apply the suspended crystalline silicon particles onto a substrate. Various layers with a number of dopants are applied to “print” the solar cell. Using this rolling process, just as the inkjet printer rolls the paper past the ink cartridge heads, cost-effective silicon cells are produced. As Innovalight’s process comes to fruition in the next couple of years, they expect an order of magnitude improvement in the cost of producing solar panels. If Antoniadis is right, the cost per watt will drop from $2.50 to $0.37, making solar much more cost-competitive than the method by which most of us get our electricity today. Such entrepreneurs and visionaries believe solar will dominate the way civilization will produce energy by the year 2100. Their belief is fueled by the abundance of silicon found on earth and the incredible amount of light energy delivered every second of the day by the sun.
Antoniadis, the Chief Technology Officer at Innovalight is disrupting the world of solar power generating products, based on nano-sized silicon embodied in ink. How fitting is it that on an August 7th baseball evening, when Barry Bonds, the chief clean-up hitter of the San Francisco Giants is disrupting the world of baseball, based on a 435 foot-sized homerun? It was a great summer night for technology and for baseball. How American is that?
Very American, but it is more than that. The success of Barry Bonds, in spite of the swirling rumors around how he may have achieved it, can be thought of as a valuable service to young men and women who follow sports in general, and baseball, in particular. Bonds’ contribution is that of a role model. He epitomizes the best of batting skills and the discipline to continually practice in order to hone and fine-tune his talent. Bonds exemplifies perseverance in his quest to achieve the goals of most valuable player and winning of a World Series championship. The former goal he achieved and the latter he will continue to pursue. The lesson for youngsters to absorb is that during the journey to achieve his goals, Bonds’ hard work led to another achievement milestone, that of homerun king. Perseverance, a solid work ethic, and developing skills are valuable goals for any impressionable youngster to internalize. These traits apply in a business setting equally well.
The success of solar or photovoltaic systems, like any other technology introduction, will be demonstrated by its market acceptance. So far solar energy is off to a good start. It is proven as a source of clean, electrical energy. Millions of businesses and homeowners are installing systems, in spite of the fact that a non-subsidized installation will likely not be cost-effective for another nine or ten years. Maybe it is just the right thing to do and these early adopters are good role models for environmental stewardship. After all, solar energy generation produces no greenhouse gases and it gives corporations and individuals a chance to reduce their carbon footprint, not to mention those bragging rights.
It seems that we can all find value in cherishing role models and doing the right thing. How American is that?
Unlocking the Potential of Solar
Recently, Applied Materials celebrated its fortieth anniversary as a leader in “Nanomanufacturing Technology” and expanded its sights (and sites too) on the solar energy industry. Today, 200 employees are part of the solar team and Gay is an integral member of this initiative to bring solar more mainstream. In the fall of 2006, Applied's president and CEO Mike Splinter said, "The solar industry has reached the inflection point that Applied Materials has been waiting for in terms of system throughput, quality, and yields, as well as suppliers' economies of scale. We plan to change the cost equation for solar power through adaptation of our existing technology and new innovation in order to help make solar a more meaningful contributor to the global energy supply."
Gay’s talk began with some facts and then moved into some assertions. Germany, in spite of its high latitude and low sun exposure, installs half of the world’s solar panel production. Next in line are Japan and then the State of California. Like other companies in the bay area, such as start-up Innovalight, Inc., Applied Materials believes that solar power will dominate the electricity supply by 2100. Current global production of solar panels delivers two nuclear power plants worth of clean, solar electricity each year and this capacity is quickly ramping.
Solar has many benefits as it can be installed off-grid or on-grid (in 2006, 63 percent of applications were on-grid and tied to the local utility), it is highly efficient, possesses clean aesthetics, is very cost-effective, and can be flexibly installed. Solar is also trending in the right direction in terms of lower cost per watt and higher power output per area. Economics bear this out. Today, in high sun regions like California where the major public utilities such as Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) rely on coal-fired and nuclear plants, the breakeven point between the cost of electricity in the summer versus the cost of a solar installation has been attained. Other countries like Spain are in a similar position. Those population centers in higher latitudes, like Germany, Canada, and the northeastern States should see such breakeven points attained by 2020.
Driving the current round of excitment in solar, in part, is the dual desire for preserving the environment and avoiding blackouts, especially in the hot summer months. Peaking power turbines burning natural gas in the summer months are incredibly expensive for the utilities. This cost, of course, is passed on to the rate payers. California’s PG&E charges 30 cents per kwh and this is escalating at a rate of 12 - 15 cents per kwh. Solar panels running around the $6 per watt level today will drop to less than $3 per watt in the near future. It makes sense to deploy solar immediately in regions of high sunlight, even without government incentives.
Power from solar in 2007 will be two gigawatts (2 GW) and increasing to 4 to 8 GW by 2010, depending upon which industry analyst projection is followed. The demand for solar is so intense that the nominal price of $35 per kilogram for silicon has shot up on the spot market to as high as $300 per kilogram. Ninety percent of solar panels are made with this common element, silicon. This is where Applied Materials comes in. They are targetting the higher growth area of thin film solar panels that today comprise only ten percent of the market. Gay expects that all computer chip companies are looking at getting into the business of solar module production, since a lot of the manufacturing processes are similar. The physics of the situation demand a ton of silicon produced each hour to deliver an annual supply of 1GW of solar panels.
Gay cited the statistic that 1 in 3 people in the world do not have access to reliable electricity. This means they do not have access to the Internet, water purification systems, and so much more. Solar can help rapidly move electricity into these new areas. Economics are making this possible today. Consider the past. The cost per transistor between 1974 and 2004 dropped by a factor of twenty million. The cost per area for electronic screens between 1995 and 2005 was reduced twenty times over. In silicon, wafer thickness has been cut in half each decade and in the past few years, the cost per watt for solar has fallen by fifty percent. Third world countries can afford to install solar systems for electrical production.
Economic trends favor distributed solar energy over centralized thermal generating stations (e.g. nuclear, coal, natural gas). Furthermore, simplicity favors solar over complex thermal producers of electricity. After all, the ancient Egyptians weren’t wrong by invoking simplicity. To build the great pyramids of Egypt, all they needed was water, sand, and cutting tools. To manufacture solar panels, the same tools and processes are used. Like cutting rock, silicon wafers are sliced using piano wire, the tools of the trade. This high tensile strength wire is a result of the tire industry and the development of radial tires. The raw material is still sand, actually silicon dioxide to be precise, and the liquid cooling material is glycol. It seems good ideas never become obsolete.
The structure of the power industry has made it complacent. Electric utilities are unique in that they spend more capital to build more plants even as they promote greater consumption of electricity that they may not have tomorrow. The regulatory bodies reward this situation by raising rates so these capital investments and operating costs can be recouped by the utility. Who pays? The consumer of electricity. Solar energy, on the other hand, breaks this paradigm. As more solar is used, the cost of electricity drops. This is causing much heartburn for many bureaucracies trying to figure out how to deal with this basic economic fact. Coupled with this shift is the ability for citizens to generate surplus electricity and feed it back into the utility electric grid and command a rebate for producing extra electricity. This is a major benefit to the utility as it reduces those expensive power peaks that occur when the sun is at its brightest.
Of interest, is the fact that California is the only state in the union that has kept its per capita consumption of energy at the same level it was in 1978. If every other state had followed suit after the oil embargo, there would be no need to debate whether America signs a Kyoto protocol or not. The U.S. would have been the leader as the lowest producer of carbon dumped into the atmosphere, in spite of its population.
Gay expects a network of distributed solar factories to replace current facilities in the near future. This change will continue to improve the megawatt per year throughput of the industry. It has gone from 0.5MW/yr in 1980 to 5 in 200 and then to 50 in 2005. The first order of magnitude jump took 20 years while the second jump only 5 years. Part of this rapid increase has been due to new manufacturing tools coming on line. In the case of Applied Materials, use of electronic display industry tools and glass coating tools have become availalble for solar manufacturers. The current manufacturing techniques are at a level called “Gen 8.” This takes advantage of both lowering the cost per area of solar panels while raising the wattage per area. Looking at a simple mathematical fraction reveals this fact in minimizing the cost per watt:
cost/m2 cost
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watt/m2 watt
The challenge is to decrease the numerator, the cost of materials and its associated process to produce the power AND increase the denominator, the amount of power that can be extracted from a given area of silicon.
To do just that, Applied Materials is using thin film technology in conjunction with tandem junctions. This gives them greater voltage as they collect more light at the infrared end of the spectrum, while enhancing stability of the photoelectric process. The use of thin films makes sense for a corporation like Applied Materials as most medium to large installs are going with thin film solar panels.
To cover the silicon, waterwhite glass is needed. Water white, low iron oxide content, ultra clear glass transmits 98 to 99 percent of light, and is anti-glare and anti-reflective coated. This is important because users want the silicon to absorb the light and not the glass to reflect it away or absorb it. The glass manufacturers now seem willing to invest in producing this glass since it sees a bigger market today. 700 tons of glass per day are used by the solar industry.
Yes, indeed, the future seems bright for the solar industry. As CEO Splinter said in 2006, "This is an exciting new chapter in Applied Materials' growth story, and we are confident that our experience, products and nanomanufacturing technology solutions can advance the industry and improve people's lives through cleaner, more affordable energy."
An Oil Sands Update with Petro-Canada’s Bruce Slevinsky, Reservoir Engineer - February 6, 2007
It was discovered from the pilot project that the temperature rises were too local. This meant that the flux densities near the wellbore were such that they would overheat. Instead of a linear relationship between heat and distance from the wellbore, a square root relationship existed. This meant that most of the heating did not occur further into the reservoir needed to more uniformly raise reservoir temperature. To salvage the electrical preheat pilot, the field production team injected water as a way to spread the heat throughout the reservoir. The results were not good enough and the danger of melting the metallic wellbores was unacceptable.
The folks I worked with during the summer of 1980 are no longer at Petro-Canada. Don Towson retired in 1994. Meanwhile the data collected and the software programs developed to do the simulations are stored on aging 5 1/4-inch floppy disks housed in dust-covered boxes. Bruce suspects the disks are unreadable and I suspect they will never be looked at again.
After the electrical preheat pilot and some brief investigations into using microwave energy, the low price of oil shelved anymore serious work into schemes for insitu extraction of oil for the next decade. Strip mining of surface deposits took priority. Today, as the price of oil remains above $50 per barrel, insitu techniques are again gaining prominence. The only economically viable way to extract oil from bitumen-laden reservoirs is by use of steam injection and leveraging the power of gravity to do the work of permeating the heat contained in the steam. The economics are driven by the simple ratio of the price of gas to the price of oil. As long as the use of three Mcfs of natural gas to extract one barrel of oil remains positive, the oil sands can produce oil without losing money. The irony of this is that the oil sands industry is using a high quality product like natural gas for its heat content to deliver a low quality product, oil. Albeit oil is a versatile commodity, an incredible amount of carbon dioxide byproduct is generated with this process, a major factor in global warming.
Other Writings for Your Reading Pleasure
1. Koslowsky's short story, Death Finds a Way, The Dangers of Whooping Cough, was written in November 2007. Inspiration was derived from research looking into vaccinations for an essay on microbiology as well as a television interview with actress Keri Russell talking about PKIDS. The story is centered on a doctor's office and a distraught mother bringing her child into the perdiatrician's office to treat a hacking cough. Enjoy the drama as an old disease confounds modern day medicine, in Death Finds a Way, The Dangers of Whooping Cough.2. Koslowsky's short story, Chloromaton, The Double Life of Element 17, was completed in December 2006. It was inspired by Joe Thornton's book "Pandora's Poison," which highlights the good and evil aspects of chlorine. Chloride salts are natural and sustain life while chlorine gas, used to produce organochlorines, is artificial and can destroy life. Enjoy either the book or Rob's incarnation of the chlorine wars, set in the legal confines of the deposition process; Chloromaton, The Double Life of Element 17.
3. Koslowsky's short story, Cornbot: Corn, Life, and the Bottom Line, was completed in October 2006. It was inspired by Michael Pollan's book "Omnivore's Dilemma," which provides a compelling argument against the world of corn that has come to rule our diets in the 21st century. Please read either the book or Rob's short story, set in Iowa as two environmental extremists consider use of violence as a means to secure social change; Cornbot: Corn, Life, and the Bottom Line.
Pricing
| Description | Mailed Paper Version | E-mailed PDF Version |
|---|---|---|
| Death Finds a Way short story | ||
| Chloromaton short story | ||
| Cornbot short story | ||
| About a World Perspective presentation | ||
| What is a Scientific Instrument? educational package* | ||
| Innovation and Utility in Industry - A Case Study conference paper** | ||
* classroom and school district license discounts available
** business and corporate license discounts available
Please make cheque or money order payable in U.S. funds to
R. K. Koslowsky, and mail to:
3747 Doverton Ct.
Santa Rosa, CA 95404
If there are any questions, please e-mail the author at:
rob.koslowsky@sbcglobal.net
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