A blog about energy and the environment.
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
BendDesk: the curved multitouch workspace of the future
Interesting technology - maybe something for KB...The Media Computing Group -- otherwise known as the dudes and dudettes responsible for making multitouch hip again -- is back, and some might say better than ever. The BendDesk is an outlandish new concept workspace for the future, relying heavily on a curved multitouch display to bring the wow. The desk is the Group's vision of merging multitouch with a common physical area, and it's probably the best implementation we've seen yet. A full ten touch points are supported, but the lower portion is also designed to be used as a standard desk, holding your laptop, paperwork and ink pen collection if you so choose. Shockingly enough, the whole thing looks exceptionally ergonomic, too. Head on past the break for a glimpse of it being used, but don't hold your breath waiting for a ship date and price -- something tells us it'll be awhile before either of those are published.
Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VNTPwVvLzE&feature=player_embedded
Monday, November 29, 2010
Sunday, November 28, 2010
Saturday, November 27, 2010
Friday, November 26, 2010
NYTimes article about creating giant solar canopies for parking areas
In California, Carports That Can Generate Electricity
Roofs of solar panels cover the parking lot of Milpitas High School and Marshall
Pomeroy Elementary School in Milpitas, Calif.
By FELICITY BARRINGER
Published: November 25, 2010
SAN JOSE, Calif. — And California begat cars, and the cars begat asphalt parking lots. And the lots spawned electricity, transforming the hills and the deserts.
Ersatz roofs made of solar panels have sprouted above dozens of school parking lots in the state, altering vistas and promoting a philosophy of green thinking among the young. Yet the primary driver of the solar roofs is economic.
By forming partnerships with banks and other backers, school districts get guarantees of reliably cheap electricity for their buildings for as long as 20 years. The institutions, which finance the systems and sell the electricity back to the schools, also receive tax incentives from the federal and state governments.
So far, solar carports have been installed at some 75 elementary, high school and community college campuses in California, the majority of them in the San Francisco area. Some are designed as a broad fan of panels canting slightly upward and supported by a single pole; more often they are an ode to rectilinearity, parallel to the asphalt and supported by a line of poles between the rows of parking spaces.
Walter Hood, a designer based in Oakland, said he sees the seeds of a new suburban aesthetic in the proliferation of the photovoltaic panels. “It’s an interesting piece of infrastructure,” he said, adding, “So maybe in the future we’re thinking of parking lots as something that is always covered.”
Schools were not the first to move in this direction. Leading the way in this re-creation of the suburban landscape was Google, which added solar canopies to the parking lots at its headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., three years ago. Some come with outlets for solar-charging electric cars.
“At the Googleplex, the P.V. is almost acting like a grove of trees,” Mr. Hood said.
But schools are now at the leading edge of the trend. “This will soon be the norm,” said Michelle O’Shea, a science teacher at Leland High School in southwestern San Jose, where the parking lot went solar a year ago. “It will be hard to imagine that we didn’t do this.”
For students, the new structures can offer an education in how clean electricity is generated. “Schoolchildren are growing up with it, so it becomes ingrained in their perception of how a society functions,” said Brad Parker, a consultant on a solar carport project for the San Luis Coastal Unified School District in central California.
And interest in the systems is growing. “I’ve gotten calls from Hawaii, from Canada, from all over California,” said John Cimino, the director of maintenance, operations and transportation for the Milpitas Unified School District, northeast of San Jose.
The solar panels fulfill 75 percent of his district’s annual electricity needs during the school year, he said, and 100 percent of its summer needs.
The company that brokered the district’s deal was Chevron Energy Solutions, a subsidiary of Chevron and perhaps the most active of a dozen such intermediaries working around California. The same company helped create a 2.1-megawatt parking lot system on the Fresno campus of California State University.
Brian Swanson, a spokesman for Pacific Gas and Electric, the utility that serves most communities in the Bay Area, said that the overall capacity of school-based photovoltaic systems there grew nearly fivefold from 2008 to 2009, to 15.5 megawatts from 327 kilowatts. This year, the cumulative total was 20 megawatts, enough to power 3,500 homes.
Yet in the Southern California city of Lancaster, a single parking-lot solar system being constructed by the Antelope Valley Unified School District could reach 9.6 megawatts, according to Mat Havens, the district’s director of facilities.
The estimated savings over the 20-year life of a generating contract can run from $12 million for a district like Milpitas (although savings last year were a much more modest $51,000) to $40 million for Antelope Valley.
Yet solar parking lots are not solely a California or Southwest phenomenon. In New Jersey, two elementary schools and a middle school in Newark plan to install them in addition to rooftop photovoltaic installations on the school buildings. Boonton High School in Morris County, N.J., is building solar coverings for its parking lots to supplement photovoltaic systems being installed on the roofs of its ice rinks.
While the solar parking lots have generally been welcomed by local residents, people in one town in San Luis Obispo County were less receptive. A community advisory board in the small coastal town of Los Osos voted 8 to 1 to oppose the panels on parking lots at a local middle and elementary school, with one panel member warning of “visual blight.”
Indeed, the current generation of solar carports does have a utilitarian feel and the bare-bones aesthetic of a Quonset hut.
But Mr. Hood, the Oakland designer, suggested that designers could work with manufacturers to change that, treating the photovoltaic materials as a potentially beguiling “surface treatment” rather than a mere assemblage of panels.
“They are becoming more ubiquitous in our landscape,” he said. “It’s not just parking lots.”
From schools to offices to malls, photovoltaic arrays could one day become as familiar as fire hydrants, Mr. Hood said.
“Once they become ubiquitous, they disappear,” he added.
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
Homeless_Improving Donation System_Midterm Poster_kim
Current Issue- As there is clothing donation bins in several residential buildings. Often, they are too big to placed in laundry rooms, so that less opportunities for people in residential buildings to donate more conveniently, and therefore, decrease in donations. In addition, 386 million lbs of clothing in nyc is thrown out annually. How can I recycle those clothings more efficiently and provide them to people who need them.
Design Strategy- I would like to focus on more efficient way of donating clothing, with the goal that every residential building can host a donation bin in their laundry room, or other appropriate spaces. Models of trash compactor, space bags are my inspirations to make a more compacted clothing donation bin. Whether then a sole product of a donation bin, it can be combined with a money donation machine, and a tax deduction receipt dispenser to motivate people to donate. Afterall, it doesn't only need to be in residential buildings, but as well as laundry mats, companies, etc.
Monday, November 22, 2010
tonight's review
Good work; now, let's push it all the way, and show how Parsons product designers can change the world.
steven
interesting article about the new Kinect game controller, and how it can be adapted for other purposes
With Kinect Controller, Hackers Take Liberties
Max Whittaker for The New York Times
Innovators like Oliver Kreylos were eager for the Xbox Kinect, but not to play games. He uses it to capture live 3-D images.
By JENNA WORTHAM
Published: November 21, 2010
When Oliver Kreylos, a computer scientist, heard about the capabilities of Microsoft’s new Kinect gaming device, he couldn’t wait to get his hands on it. “I dropped everything, rode my bike to the closest game store and bought one,” he said.
Bryce Vickmark for The New York Times
Philipp Robbel combined an iRobot device and the new Microsoft controller that can recognize gestures. He calls it the KinectBot.
Theo Watson and Emily Gobeille created a puppet show using a Kinect.
Mehmet S. Akten uses the system to draw in 3-D.
But he had no interest in playing video games with the Kinect, which is meant to be plugged into an Xbox and allows players to control the action onscreen by moving their bodies.
Mr. Kreylos, who specializes in virtual reality and 3-D graphics, had just learned that he could download some software and use the device with his computer instead. He was soon using it to create “holographic” video images that can be rotated on a computer screen. A video he posted on YouTube last week caused jaws to drop and has been watched 1.3 million times.
Mr. Kreylos is part of a crowd of programmers, roboticists and tinkerers who are getting the Kinect to do things it was not really meant to do. The attraction of the device is that it is outfitted with cameras, sensors and software that let it detect movement, depth, and the shape and position of the human body.
Companies respond to this kind of experimentation with their products in different ways — and Microsoft has had two very different responses since the Kinect was released on Nov. 4. It initially made vague threats about working with law enforcement to stop “product tampering.” But by last week, it was embracing the benevolent hackers.
“Anytime there is engagement and excitement around our technology, we see that as a good thing,” said Craig Davidson, senior director for Xbox Live at Microsoft. “It’s naïve to think that any new technology that comes out won’t have a group that tinkers with it.”
Microsoft and other companies would be wise to keep an eye on this kind of outside innovation and consider wrapping some of the creative advances into future products, said Loren Johnson, an analyst at Frost & Sullivan who follows digital media and consumer electronics.
“These adaptations could be a great benefit to their own bottom line,” he said. “It’s a trend that is undeniable, using public resources to improve on products, whether it be the Kinect or anything else.”
Microsoft invested hundreds of millions of dollars in Kinect in the hopes of wooing a broader audience of gamers, like those who enjoy using the motion-based controllers of the Nintendo Wii.
Word of the technical sophistication and low price of the device spread quickly in tech circles.
Building a device with the Kinect’s capabilities would require “thousands of dollars, multiple Ph.D.’s and dozens of months,” said Limor Fried, an engineer and founder ofAdafruit Industries, a store in New York that sells supplies for experimental hardware projects. “You can just buy this at any game store for $150.”
On the day the Kinect went on sale, Ms. Fried and Phillip Torrone, a designer and senior editor of Make magazine, which features do-it-yourself technology projects, announced a $3,000 cash bounty for anyone who created and released free software allowing the Kinect to be used with a computer instead of an Xbox.
Microsoft quickly gave the contest a thumbs-down. In an interview with CNet News, a company representative said that it did not “condone the modification of its products” and that it would “work closely with law enforcement and product safety groups to keep Kinect tamper-resistant.”
That is not much different from the approach taken by Apple, which has released software upgrades for its iPhone operating system in an effort to block any unsanctioned hacks or software running on its devices.
But other companies whose products have been popular targets for tinkering have actively encouraged it. One example is iRobot, the company that makes the Roomba, a small robotic vacuum cleaner. That product was so popular with robotics enthusiasts that the company began selling the iRobot Create, a programmable machine with no dusting capabilities.
Mr. Davidson said Microsoft now had no concerns about the Kinect-hacking fan club, but he said the company would be monitoring developments. A modification that compromises the Xbox system, violates the company’s terms of service or “degrades the experience for everyone is not something we want,” he said.
Other creative uses of the Kinect involve drawing 3-D doodles in the air and then rotating them with a nudge of the hand, and manipulating colorful animated puppets on a computer screen. Most, if not all, of the prototypes were built using the open-source code released as a result of the contest sponsored by Ms. Fried and Mr. Torrone, which was won by Hector Martin, a 20-year-old engineering student in Spain.
The KinectBot, cobbled together in a weekend by Philipp Robbel, a Ph.D. candidate at theMassachusetts Institute of Technology, combines the Kinect and an iRobot Create. It uses the Kinect’s sensors to detect humans, respond to gesture and voice commands, and generate 3-D maps of what it is seeing as it rolls through a room.
Mr. Robbel said the KinectBot offered a small glimpse into the future of machines that could aid in the search for survivors after a natural disaster.
“This is only the tip of the iceberg,” he said of the wave of Kinect experimentation. “We are going to see an exponential number of videos and tests over the coming weeks and months as more people get their hands on this device.”
Toying around with the Kinect could go beyond being a weekend hobby. It could potentially lead to a job. In late 2007, Johnny Lee, then a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon, was so taken by the Wii that he rigged a system that would allow it to track his head movements and adjust the screen perspective accordingly.
A video of Mr. Lee demonstrating the technology was a hit on YouTube, as were his videos of other Wii-related projects. By June 2008, he had a job at Microsoft as part of the core team working on the Kinect software that distinguishes between players and parts of the body.
“The Wii videos made me much more visible to the products people at Xbox,” Mr. Lee said. “They were that much more interested in me because of the videos.”
Mr. Lee said he was “very happy” to see the response the Kinect was getting among people much like himself. “I’m glad they are inspired and that they like the technology,” he said. “I think they’ll be able to do really cool things with it.”
Thursday, November 18, 2010
unfortunately, microcredit is not a cure-all.....
India Microcredit Faces Collapse From Defaults
By LYDIA POLGREEN and VIKAS BAJAJ
Published: November 17, 2010
MADOOR, India — India’s rapidly growing private microcredit industry faces imminent collapse as almost all borrowers in one of India’s largest states have stopped repaying their loans, egged on by politicians who accuse the industry of earning outsize profits on the backs of the poor.
Kuni Takahashi for The New York Times
K. Shivamma, a 38-year-old farmer in the Indian village of Madoor, is struggling to pay back a debt of almost $2,000 incurred through microloans.
Kuni Takahashi for The New York Times
D. Mallama spoke about her daughter, Durgamma, who ran away from her village in Andhra Pradesh, India, after not being able to pay back loans from microfinance agencies.
The crisis has been building for weeks, but has now reached a critical stage. Indian banks, which put up about 80 percent of the money that the companies lent to poor consumers, are increasingly worried that after surviving the global financial crisis mostly unscathed, they could now face serious losses. Indian banks have about $4 billion tied up in the industry, banking officials say.
“We are extremely worried about our exposure to themicrofinance sector,” said Sunand K. Mitra, a senior executive at Axis Bank, speaking Tuesday on a panel at the India Economic Summit.
The region’s crisis is likely to reverberate around the globe. Initially the work of nonprofit groups, the tiny loans to the poor known as microcredit once seemed a promising path out of poverty for millions. In recent years, foundations, venture capitalists and the World Bank have used India as a petri dish for similar for-profit “social enterprises” that seek to make money while filling a social need. Like-minded industries have sprung up in Africa, Latin America and other parts of Asia.
But microfinance in pursuit of profits has led some microcredit companies around the world to extend loans to poor villagers at exorbitant interest rates and without enough regard for their ability to repay. Some companies have more than doubled their revenues annually.
Now some Indian officials fear that microfinance could become India’s version of the United States’ subprime mortgage debacle, in which the seemingly noble idea of extending home ownership to low-income households threatened to collapse the global banking system because of a reckless, grow-at-any-cost strategy.
Responding to public anger over abuses in the microcredit industry — and growing reports of suicides among people unable to pay mounting debts — legislators in the state of Andhra Pradesh last month passed a stringent new law restricting how the companies can lend and collect money.
Even as the new legislation was being passed, local leaders urged people to renege on their loans, and repayments on nearly $2 billion in loans in the state have virtually ceased. Lenders say that less than 10 percent of borrowers have made payments in the past couple of weeks.
If the trend continues, the industry faces collapse in a state where more than a third of its borrowers live. Lenders are also having trouble making new loans in other states, because banks have slowed lending to them as fears about defaults have grown.
Government officials in the state say they had little choice but to act, and point to women like Durgamma Dappu, a widowed laborer from this impoverished village who took a loan from a private microfinance company because she wanted to build a house.
She had never had a bank account or earned a regular salary but was given a $200 loan anyway, which she struggled to repay. So she took another from a different company, then another, until she was nearly $2,000 in debt. In September she fled her village, leaving her family little choice but to forfeit her tiny plot of land, and her dreams.
“These institutions are using quite coercive methods to collect,” said V. Vasant Kumar, the state’s minister for rural development. “They aren’t looking at sustainability or ensuring the money is going to income-generating activities. They are just making money.”
Reddy Subrahmanyam, a senior official who helped write the Andhra Pradesh legislation, accuses microfinance companies of making “hyperprofits off the poor,” and said the industry had become no better than the widely despised village loan sharks it was intended to replace.
“The money lender lives in the community,” he said. “At least you can burn down his house. With these companies, it is loot and scoot.”
Indeed, some of the anger appears to have been fueled by the recent initial public offering of shares by SKS Microfinance, India’s largest for-profit microlender, backed by famous investors like George Soros and Vinod Khosla, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems.
SKS and its shareholders raised more than $350 million on the stock market in August. Its revenue and profits have grown around 100 percent annually in recent years. This year, Vikram Akula, chairman of SKS Microfinance, privately sold shares worth about $13 million.
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