Friday, July 29. 2011
Via The Doors of Perception
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By Kristi
I have just received a quite extraordinary 736 page book called Lean Logic: A Dictionary For The Future and How To Survive It by the English ecologist David Fleming. The publisher describes it as a "community of essays". In my words it's half encyclopedia, half commonplace book, half a secular bible, half survival guide, half ... yes, that's a lot of halves, but I hope you get the picture. I have never encountered a book that is so hard to characacterise yet so hard, despite its weight, to put down.
The editors of Lean Logic, who have completed the project following Fleming's untimely death last year, say it's about "cooperative self-reliance in the face of great uncertainty". Well, yes. But today I have also read entries on nanotechnlogy, carnival, casuistry, multiculturalism, and the 'new domestication' - and I still have more than 1,000 entries to read. Waiting for me ahead are entries on road pricing, the vernacular, trust, resilience, the marshes of Iraq...
Lean Logic does not sugar-coat the challenges we face: an economy that destroys the very foundations upon which it depends; climate weirdness; ecological systems under stress; shocks to community and culture. Neither does the book suggest that there are easy solutions to these dilemmas. As Fleming has said, "large scale problems do not require large-scale solutions - they require small-scale solutions within a large-scale framework.
This is not a book to read from start to finish - although entry Number 1, on Abstraction, is engaging enough. Fleming defines abstraction as "Displacement of the particular - people, places, purpose - by general principle". Within a few lines Fleming introduces someone I never heard of, Alexander Herzen [1812-1870], as one of the first writers to "make the case for local detail, for pragmatic decision-making, for near-at-hand, for 'presence'. Fleming goes on to quote such other "scourges of abstraction" as Oliver Goldsmith, Montaigne, Joseph Conrad, and Matthew Arnold. And that's all on page one.
Among the incredibly useful passages I've already discovered are: a long text about 'resilience' and its multiple meanings; a clear account of Energy Decent Action Plans; an explanation of Harmonic Order; a comparative guide to barter through the ages; and a section on Lean Health.
Fleming was a co-founder of the UK Green Party, chair of the Soil Association, and active from its early days in the Transition Towns movement. He was one of the first people in the world to understand the implications for industrial civilzation of peak oil, and a good deal of the book is about energy in its many meanings. Fleming was the inventor - and advocate for more than a decade - of Tradeable Energy Quotas or TEQs. This energy rationing scheme is designed to share out fairly a nation's shrinking - as it must and will - energy/carbon budget, while allowing maximum freedom of choice over energy use.
But Lean Logic is neither a policy manifesto nor a dry technical guide. It's an incredibly nourishing cultural and scientific treasure trove. Its pages span ethics, science, culture, art, and history. The book's greatest strength, for this mesmerized reader, is the lightness with which it draws on knowledge from earlier periods of history, and from other cultures.
Lean Logic has been printed in a hardback first edition of just 500 copies, so get your order in quick.
Via Rhizome
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by Jason Huff
When conjuring up a reason why white is the dominant shade of Modernity one might think of the soon to be retired space shuttle Atlantis or the seminal architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret (also known as Le Corbusier). Depending on your preference of medium you can view it as an additive or subtractive color, but the question remains: why is the color white linked to "hi-tech" gadgets, architecture, and visions of the future?
John Powers, a Brooklyn-based sculptor recently ruminated on this question and discovered it has an intriguing and complicated history and relationship with technology. Powers maps the trends of the color against various historical events, revealing along the way that Jacob Riis' 1890 flash photographs of lower Manhattan's tenements and Platex bra construction played surprisingly important roles. According to Powers' research, Modern white's psychological associations and aesthetic perceptions are driven by a mix of technological advancements in electric lights, the garment industry, and space travel.
Original Edison light bulb; Weissenhofsiedlung (1927) via Star Wars Modern
Seamstress Jane Butchin, Delma Domegy, Inspector Mary Todd, and others at ILC Plant (1967); Astronauts Charles Conrad and Alen Bean (1969) via Star Wars Modern
John Powers' ten-part essay titled White Walls:
Three new experiments highlight the power of optogenetics—a type of genetic engineering that allows scientists to control brain cells with light.
Karl Deisseroth and colleagues at Stanford University used light to trigger and then alleviate social deficits in mice that resemble those seen in autism. Researchers targeted a highly evolved part of the brain called the prefrontal cortex, which is well connected to other brain regions and involved in planning, execution, personality and social behavior. They engineered cells to become either hyperactive or underactive in response to specific wavelengths of light.
According to a report from Stanford;
The experimental mice exhibited no difference from the normal mice in tests of their anxiety levels, their tendency to move around or their curiosity about new objects. But, the team observed, the animals in whose medial prefrontal cortex excitability had been optogenetically stimulated lost virtually all interest in engaging with other mice to whom they were exposed. (The normal mice were much more curious about one another.)
The findings support one of the theories behind the neurodevelopmental deficits of autism and schizophrenia; that in these disorders, the brain is wired in a way that makes it hyperactive, or overly susceptible to overstimulation. That may explain why many autistic children are very sensitive to loud noises or other environmental stimuli.
"Boosting their excitatory nerve cells largely abolished their social behavior," said Deisseroth, [associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and of bioengineering and the study's senior author]. In addition, these mice's brains showed the same gamma-oscillation pattern that is observed among many autistic and schizophrenic patients. "When you raise the firing likelihood of excitatory cells in the medial prefrontal cortex, you see an increased gamma oscillation right away, just as one would predict it would if this change in the excitatory/inhibitory balance were in fact relevant."
In a second study, from Japan, researchers used optogenetics to make mice fall asleep by engineering a specific type of neuron in the hypothalamus, part of the brain that regulates sleep. Shining light on these neurons inhibited their activity, sending the mice into dreamless (or non-REM) sleep. The research, published this month in the Journal of Neuroscience, might shed light on narcolepsy, a disorder of sudden sleep attacks.
Rather than making mice fall asleep, a third group of researchers used optogenetics disrupt sleep in mice, which in turn affected their memory. Previous research has shown that sleep is important for consolidating, or storing, memories, and that diseases characterized by sleep deficits, such as sleep apnea, often have memory deficits as well. But it has been difficult to analyze the effect of more subtle disruptions to sleep.
The new study shows that "regardless of the total amount of sleep, a minimal unit of uninterrupted sleep is crucial for memory consolidation," the authors write in the study published online July 25 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
They genetically engineered a group of neurons involved in switching between sleep and wake to be sensitive to light. Stimulating these cells with 10-second bursts of light fragmented the animals' sleep without affecting total sleep time or quality and composition of sleep.
According to a press release from Stanford;
After manipulating the mice's sleep, the researchers had the animals undergo a task during which they were placed in a box with two objects: one to which they had previously been exposed, and another that was new to them. Rodents' natural tendency is to explore novel objects, so if they spent more time with the new object, it would indicate that they remembered the other, now familiar object. In this case, the researchers found that the mice with fragmented sleep didn't explore the novel object longer than the familiar one — as the control mice did — showing that their memory was affected.
The findings, "point to a specific characteristic of sleep — continuity — as being critical for memory," said [H. Craig Heller, professor of biology at Stanford and one of the authors of the study.]
Thursday, July 28. 2011
Via Pruned
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by Alexander Trevi
(Photo courtesy of the Center for PostNatural History.)
We've always liked the work produced by the Center for PostNatural History, so it's great to hear that they've recently opened a central location in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to house their collections, a ragtag bunch that usually travels around from galleries to museums to more atypical exhibition spaces. It's not Plum Island though.
Via MIT Technology Review
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Powerful design tools and techniques such as 3-D printing enable manufacturers to be more nimble, says Autodesk's manufacturing boss.
By Tom Simonite
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3-D printing: A 3-D printer squirted out each of the 200 plastic parts in this 10-foot-long turbo-prop engine, demonstrating a technology that could soon be used for more than just prototyping.
Credit: Autodesk |
Autodesk, a multinational software company based in San Rafael, California, makes 3-D design software used by everyone from automotive manufacturing giants to Hollywood studios. Now it is betting that those digital tools will have an increasingly powerful role in what happens on factory floors, enabling manufacturers to embrace more flexible strategies that deliver more customized products.
Buzz Kross, who heads the company's manufacturing industry group, says the manufacturers he works with see an opportunity in new technology at a time when they sense that the boom in outsourcing to China has run its course. "There have always been companies that differentiate based on their ability to manufacture most efficiently, and others based on design and invention—it's the difference between GM and Tesla," says Kross. "Now a lot of manufacturers are leaning more to the design model."
Kross says that rising costs in China's maturing economy and high-profile problems with out-sourced components, like those that plagued Boeing's 787, are making the model of high-volume, low-cost outsourced production less economically attractive. The result is that a wider range of companies are considering adopting a more flexible, premium approach to manufacturing that has previously been limited to a relatively small niche. Kross is trying to help that trend along with software such as Inventor, which provides a way to digitally prototype and test mechanical designs, and Streamline, which enables engineers, designers, and managers to collaborate on a design. Both are intended to speed the journey from digital drawing board to factory floor.
"You don't need to center everything on making millions of the same thing at the absolute cheapest price anymore," says Kross. He cites the growing popularity of a model known as ETO (engineer to order), in which businesses buying from manufacturers order by referring to a list of general rules, not a catalogue and price list. For each order, a manufacturer makes and assembles a product very specific to the customer's needs. That approach also cuts costs, because raw materials and parts don't have to be held in stock; rather, they can be purchased to match the latest order. And the customized products can command a higher price than a conventionally made one, Kross says: "These companies capture a larger share of the customer's wallet this way."
That style of manufacturing makes the design process—and design software—much more central. Kross says that 3-D printing technology will blur the line between design and manufacturing still further.
"Everybody's already embracing it for prototyping," says Kross. "You can already print moving components and subassemblies that don't need any assembly. That's incredibly useful, whether you make pumps or power trains or chairs." Nike, an Autodesk customer, prototypes shoes by using a printer to squirt out materials that have more or less compressibility, depending on how bouncy and flexible each part of the sole is meant to be.
The next step is for 3-D printing to become a manufacturing method rather than solely a prototyping tool, says Kross. Small companies are already trying this, but it won't be long before large manufacturers follow suit. "Think about when you buy a Dell computer and they let you choose all the different components," Kroll says. "3-D printing for manufacturing will allow you to have that, but with nearly infinite options."
This process may cost manufacturers more than production at a more conventional or offshore factory. But as with the ETO approach, more customized products fetch higher prices, says Kroll. Jewelry, furniture, and consumer electronics are all areas that could benefit from the new techniques, he says. "People don't like it when they have the same thing as everything else and will pay more to get exactly what they choose."
Copyright Technology Review 2011.
Personal comment:
We are just ending the beta version of a project where we used Inventor to pre-assemble, then laser cut and fold all the parts of the object. Like many of us now. Well, then this is still not an easy process... and our object remain relatively small. But when the softwares and machines will become efficient enough from sketching to building (possibly Revit with its BIM model --to which should be added some strong scripting and design options--), through prototyping, these will truely become powerful design tools opening up to a new design paradigm.
And its interesting to underline the fact that this way of producing could also be taken into account for a sustainable design approach.
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