Smarter Than You Think
Articles in this series are examining the recent advances in artificial intelligence and robotics and their potential impact on society.
Monday, May 16, 2011
Ear plugs that allow quiet sound in while blocking loud ones.
This reminds me of Toshi's product, except it is sort of the reverse. Click here for more information.
Friday, May 13, 2011
Dieter Rams interview...iconic twentieth century product designer.
There is an exhibits of rams products at vitsoe at 33 Bond street through May 28. click here for details
CURRENTS | Q&A
Dieter Rams, Designer of Stereos, Shavers and Shelves
By RIMA SUQI
Published: May 11, 2011
Dieter Rams is considered by many to be a design legend. The 78-year-old German designer is probably best known for the work he did as the design director at Braun (a job he held from 1961 until 1997), where he was responsible for some of the best-looking and -sounding stereo components ever made, along with a host of other products like shavers and kitchen appliances. He has inspired a number of other designers, including Jasper Morrison, Naoto Fukasawa and Jonathan Ive, the senior vice president for industrial design at Apple, who wrote the foreword to “As Little Design as Possible: The Work of Dieter Rams,” by Sophie Lovell, out next month from Phaidon Press.
A Braun stereo he designed in 1956.
Mr. Rams with his shelving system.
The shelving system in one of his sketches.
Mr. Rams was recently in town to celebrate the 50th birthday of his 606 Universal Shelving System and to attend the opening of the corresponding exhibition, “60s 606 Is 50,” at the Vitsoe showroom in NoHo. On a recent afternoon, he was dressed in a sharp tan corduroy suit, wearing his trademark horn-rimmed glasses and carrying a cane, when he met a reporter at Vitsoe, a company created in 1959 to produce his designs.
That’s a nice cane.
The cane was a present from Nanna Ditzel 40 years ago. I never knew at that time I would need it one day. I had an operation. I have a new part in my knee, some mechanical thing.
Are you enjoying New York?
I like to be in New York. Le Corbusier described it in the 1930s as a “wonderful catastrophe.” It is still a wonderful catastrophe, but inspiring. One thing I am crazy about is the seafood — the littleneck clams. I like them very much, at that place in Grand Central Station.
The Oyster Bar?
Yes, it is always busy.
Are you really retired? You don’t seem like the retiring type.
Yes. I sit, I think, I make some drawings. As a designer, you cannot retire totally. I have some new things coming, but it’s a question of investigation and some money.
What’s an average day for you?
I am not an early bird. I go to bed normally between midnight and 1 o’clock, so it is understandable that I cannot be an early bird. I wake up around 9 o’clock. Even when I was with Braun, and I was responsible for a lot of people, if they had meetings, I had to be there at 8 or the latest 9. But if there were no meetings, I always tried not to start before 9 o’clock.
You have a very nice Japanese-style garden at your home in Kronberg.
I was often in Japan for Braun, and I was always fascinated by the Japanese garden.
What about it?
The whole arrangement, with the water, the stones, how they cut the trees down to bonsais. So I decided, as I built my house in 1971, not only to insulate the swimming pool but also to make a garden influenced by the Japanese gardens.
There is always something to do there — it’s a kind of design to cut the trees in a way that they are not getting bigger but still have their own charisma. But it is not a real Japanese garden, because we have different weather, so I call it a Japanese-inspired European garden. You have to spend a lot of time on it, and sometimes I don’t have the time, so I hear about it from my wife.
How did you meet your wife?
She’s a photographer. I was falling in love with a photographer who was a friend of hers. They studied together. Then she, the first, decided to marry another man, and leave me with her friend.
So it happened that we lived together a long time without being married; we married after 10 years. We don’t have children. We had a cat — she died — and now we can’t decide if we should get a new one. She was a very special cat.
Are you an only child?
I am the only child. And it was not a nice time. My parents decided in 1940 or 1939 that they couldn’t live anymore together; I was sent to boarding school. I was 14 or 15 as the war was ending. I was living mostly with my grandparents, because before, during the war, everything was difficult. The schools were closed because of the bombings. So I came back to my birth city, Wiesbaden, not far from Frankfurt, and stayed with my grandparents. My grandfather was a carpenter, he specialized in surfaces. I learned from him how to polish pianos, for example.
Were you interested in that?
My interest was to stay with architecture, with additional studies for landscape planning.
You mean urban planning?
Yes. I think it is now very important. There is a lot of bad architecture. What we need more is to look at how our landscape should look in the next decades.
What’s wonderful in New York is that old train park. I want to see that.
The High Line can get very crowded — you should go early. Tell me more about your home. For someone who advocates having “less,” you seem to have collected a lot of things there.
If I don’t have those things, I cannot improve them. I have to work with those things. It doesn’t end when you are finished, especially with the shelf system. It’s improved in a lot of details.
Are you still trying to improve other things?
Most of the things are done already — you can’t make it better. Look at chairs: there are enough chairs. There are bad chairs, some good ones, mostly bad ones. But there are, even with a chair, possibilities to make it more comfortable or, from the economic point, you can make it cheaper, save some material or you can try new materials.
I hear you’ve started a foundation.
The idea behind it is to help young designers to get an education.
Will it also provide funds to preserve your house?
The house belongs to the foundation.
It must be odd to think about things like that.
People say that the house, with all the things, it looks like a museum. Of course it does. There are all those things I worked on, and some things I am still working on. We have nobody, no children. That is the reason we made the foundation. I am interested that it stays in the right hands.
“60s 606 Is 50” runs through May 28 at Vitsoe, 33 Bond Street (Lafayette Street); information: (917) 675-6990 or vitsoe.com.
East congo rape crisis much worse than originally thought....
Congo Study Sets Estimate for Rapes Much Higher
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
Published: May 11, 2011
A new study in The American Journal of Public Health, expected to be published Thursday online, estimates that nearly two million women have been raped in the Democratic Republic of Congo, with women victimized at a rate of nearly one every minute.
Michael Kamber for The New York Times
Anna Mburano, who says she is about 80 years old, stands in front of her home in Luvungi, Congo, with Joel, her 2-year-old grandson. She was raped when rebels from a nearby forest swarmed and occupied the village in 2010.
The study, one of the first comprehensive looks at the prevalence of rape in Congo, indicates that the problem is much bigger and more pervasive than previously thought. Women have reported alarming levels of sexual abuse in the capital and in provinces far from Congo’s war-torn east, a sign that the problem extends beyond the nation’s primary conflict zone.
“Not only is sexual violence more generalized,” the study said, “but our findings suggest that future policies and programs should focus on abuse within families.”
For the past 15 years, Congo has been racked by myriad rebel groups that terrorize civilians, particularly in the east, often to exploit the country’s mineral riches or to flaunt their abusive power. United Nations officials have called Congo the epicenter of rape as a weapon of war, and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton visited rape victims in eastern Congo in 2009 in an effort to draw more attention to one of Africa’s most intractable and disturbing conflicts.
Still, comprehensive statistics have been hard to come by. Many areas of Congo are inaccessible — cut off by thick forests and warring groups — and many victims have been too frightened to speak out. The central government is also weak, which has exacerbated the violence and made it difficult to collect information.
The conclusions in the new study, by three public health researchers — Amber Peterman of the International Food Policy Research Institute, Tia Palermo of Stony Brook University and Caryn Bredenkamp of the World Bank — are based on extrapolations from a household survey done in 2007 of 3,436 Congolese women nationwide.
The researchers found that around 12 percent were raped at least once in their lifetime and 3 percent were raped in the one-year period before the survey. Around 22 percent had been forced by their partners to have sex or perform sexual acts against their will, the study showed, implying that sexual abuse often happened at home. The women, ages 15 to 49, were interviewed in a demographic and health survey partly financed by the American government.
The study’s authors then used current population estimates, which put Congo’s population at around 70 million, to extrapolate that as many as 1.8 million Congolese women had been raped, with up to 433,785 raped in the one-year period, which would mean almost a rape a minute.
Congo has been the subject of sweeping studies before, including some by the International Rescue Committee, a private aid organization, which has estimated that Congo’s civil war has claimed more lives than any other conflict since World War II. Some scientists have criticized those studies as being too reliant on projections and not grounded enough in hard facts.
Michael VanRooyen, director of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, which has sent doctors to Congo to treat rape victims, said that there were “some limitations in the methodology, such as the sampling methods and the sample sizes” of the new rape study. But he argued that “the important message remains: that rape and sexual slavery have become amazingly commonplace in this region of the D.R.C., and have defined this conflict as a war against women.”
The study’s authors believe the rape problem may be worse than their study suggests. The findings are based on survey results from females of reproductive age, but many reports and witness accounts have shown that armed men often gang-rape young girls — some even toddlers — and women in their 70s and older, in addition to a growing number of men and boys. Also, many rape victims never report being assaulted because of the shame and stigma. In Congo, countless women have been abandoned by their husbands after being raped.
“There are two big surprises in the study,” said Anthony Gambino, mission director for Congo of the United States Agency for International Development in 2001-4. “First, the magnitude of the problem — rates of rape that are much higher than seen elsewhere. And, second, that these alarming, shockingly high rape statistics are found in western Congo as well as northern and eastern Congo.”
Scientists and aid workers have struggled to pinpoint exactly why so many women are raped in Congo. Mr. Gambino says it may be related to nearly 40 years of “steady economic and political decline,” which has meant that the government’s presence has essentially disappeared from many areas of Congo.
Thursday, May 12, 2011
automatic cars
SMARTER THAN YOU THINK
Google Cars Drive Themselves, in Traffic
Ramin Rahimian for The New York Times
Dmitri Dolgov, a Google engineer, in a self-driving car parked in Silicon Valley after a road test.
By JOHN MARKOFF
Published: October 9, 2010
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Anyone driving the twists of Highway 1 between San Francisco and Los Angeles recently may have glimpsed aToyota Prius with a curious funnel-like cylinder on the roof. Harder to notice was that the person at the wheel was not actually driving.
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Ramin Rahimian for The New York Times
A self-driving car developed and outfitted by Google, with device on roof, cruising along recently on Highway 101 in Mountain View, Calif.
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The car is a project of Google, which has been working in secret but in plain view on vehicles that can drive themselves, using artificial-intelligence software that can sense anything near the car and mimic the decisions made by a human driver.
With someone behind the wheel to take control if something goes awry and a technician in the passenger seat to monitor the navigation system, seven test cars have driven 1,000 miles without human intervention and more than 140,000 miles with only occasional human control. One even drove itself down Lombard Street in San Francisco, one of the steepest and curviest streets in the nation. The only accident, engineers said, was when one Google car was rear-ended while stopped at a traffic light.
Autonomous cars are years from mass production, but technologists who have long dreamed of them believe that they can transform society as profoundly as the Internet has.
Robot drivers react faster than humans, have 360-degree perception and do not get distracted, sleepy or intoxicated, the engineers argue. They speak in terms of lives saved and injuries avoided — more than 37,000 people died in car accidents in the United States in 2008. The engineers say the technology could double the capacity of roads by allowing cars to drive more safely while closer together. Because the robot cars would eventually be less likely to crash, they could be built lighter, reducing fuel consumption. But of course, to be truly safer, the cars must be far more reliable than, say, today’s personal computers, which crash on occasion and are frequently infected.
The Google research program using artificial intelligence to revolutionize the automobile is proof that the company’s ambitions reach beyond the search engine business. The program is also a departure from the mainstream of innovation in Silicon Valley, which has veered toward social networks and Hollywood-style digital media.
During a half-hour drive beginning on Google’s campus 35 miles south of San Francisco last Wednesday, a Prius equipped with a variety of sensors and following a route programmed into the GPS navigation system nimbly accelerated in the entrance lane and merged into fast-moving traffic on Highway 101, the freeway through Silicon Valley.
It drove at the speed limit, which it knew because the limit for every road is included in its database, and left the freeway several exits later. The device atop the car produced a detailed map of the environment.
The car then drove in city traffic through Mountain View, stopping for lights and stop signs, as well as making announcements like “approaching a crosswalk” (to warn the human at the wheel) or “turn ahead” in a pleasant female voice. This same pleasant voice would, engineers said, alert the driver if a master control system detected anything amiss with the various sensors.
The car can be programmed for different driving personalities — from cautious, in which it is more likely to yield to another car, to aggressive, where it is more likely to go first.
Christopher Urmson, a Carnegie Mellon University robotics scientist, was behind the wheel but not using it. To gain control of the car he has to do one of three things: hit a red button near his right hand, touch the brake or turn the steering wheel. He did so twice, once when a bicyclist ran a red light and again when a car in front stopped and began to back into a parking space. But the car seemed likely to have prevented an accident itself.
When he returned to automated “cruise” mode, the car gave a little “whir” meant to evoke going into warp drive on “Star Trek,” and Dr. Urmson was able to rest his hands by his sides or gesticulate when talking to a passenger in the back seat. He said the cars did attract attention, but people seem to think they are just the next generation of the Street View cars that Google uses to take photographs and collect data for its maps.
The project is the brainchild of Sebastian Thrun, the 43-year-old director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, a Google engineer and the co-inventor of the Street View mapping service.
In 2005, he led a team of Stanford students and faculty members in designing the Stanley robot car, winning the second Grand Challenge of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a $2 million Pentagon prize for driving autonomously over 132 miles in the desert.
Besides the team of 15 engineers working on the current project, Google hired more than a dozen people, each with a spotless driving record, to sit in the driver’s seat, paying $15 an hour or more. Google is using six Priuses and an Audi TT in the project.
Monday, May 9, 2011
End of the Year Calendar
If someone would like to put this into a table feel free.
05.16.2011 Monday 5-9pm 2nd floor, 25 East 13th
Delivery and installation of unmounted boards with models
05.23.2011 Monday 2nd floor, 25 East 13th
Remove work from space
05.26.2011 Thursday 2nd floor, 25 East 13th
All other work removed
GENERAL EXHIBITION CALENDAR
05.14 - 05.15 Saturday and Sunday 7th Floor, 2 West 13th
Clean out studio space
05.15.2011 Sunday 2nd floor, 25 East 13th
Exhibition team set up product displays
05.17.2011 Tuesday 2nd floor, 25 East 13th
Installation continues, EXHIBITION OPENING NIGHT
05.18.2011 Wednesday 2nd floor, 25 East 13th
Press breakfast
Graduation Fair for Class of 2011 2-6pm
Arnold Hall, 55 West 13th Street, 2nd floor
05.21.2011 Saturday
SCE GRADUATION 9-12pm
Tischman... double check from new e-mail
Last day of Exhibition 2nd floor, 25 East 13th
05.23.2011 Monday Javit Convention Center North on 11th Ave and 40th St.
NEW SCHOOL COMMENCEMENT CEREMONY 2:30 pm
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