Curry Stone Design Prize Announces Five Finalists

The Curry Stone Design Prize recognizes exceptional designers based on individual merit and the potential to bring their ideas to fruition. The prize focuses on emerging design ideas that contribute to the vitality of the world community. These designs may improve the human spirit, increase awareness of the environment, or respond to an area of need, whether to provide shelter and clean water or address climate change and humanitarian crises.

Shawn Frayne, 27, inventor of the Windbelt, the world’s first non-turbine wind-powered generator. The technology, which is light enough to hold in your hand, has enormous potential to help people in poor communities power lamps, run small vaccine refrigerators and charge cell phones for pennies a day. Frayne was inspired to create the Windbelt after a visit to a village in Haiti where residents rely on costly kerosene and diesel for lack of an electrical grid.

Wes Janz, 55, architect and associate professor of architecture at Ball State University in Indiana and author of the forthcoming book, “One Small Project.” Janz’s practice focuses on “leftover places” – the world’s slums and settlements where people build shelters from scavenged materials – as sites of innovation and inspiration for architects committed to using their craft for social good. In collaboration with his students and local communities, Janz has constructed shelters and pavilions in Argentina, Sri Lanka and elsewhere from found materials such as mud and rubble from demolished buildings.

Lexington, KY, August 26, 2008—An architectural firm that builds homes from sandbags in the shantytowns of Cape Town, South Africa, the young inventor of the world’s first non-turbine wind-powered generator, and an Indiana-based university professor who builds shelters using scavenged materials are among the five finalists for the inaugural Curry Stone Design Prize. The winner will be announced Sept. 25, 2008 at the IdeaFestival in Louisville, KY.
The Curry Stone Design Prize, administered by the University of Kentucky College of Design, is awarded every year to breakthrough design solutions with the power and potential to improve our lives and the world we live in. Jurors for this year’s prize are journalist John Hockenberry, internationally acclaimed architect David Adjaye, designer Renny Ramakers; prize founder Clifford Curry; and Michael Speaks, international design scholar and dean of University of Kentucky’s College of Design.

“The prize finalists selected this year personify the spirit of ingenuity and resourcefulness that designers can bring to solving the world’s most formidable challenges,” said David Mohney, Prize Secretary and Curry Stone Chair in Design at the University of Kentucky. The prize winner receives an award of $100,000; up to four finalists receive $10,000 each. Finalists are selected from a pool of nominees submitted by leaders from the architecture and design communities.

The prize finalists, who will be officially unveiled on Sept. 13, 2008 at the 11th International Venice Architecture Biennale are:

Shawn Frayne, 27, inventor of the Windbelt

Wes Janz, 55, architect

MMA Architects, whose principals, Luyanda Mpahlwa, 49, and Mphethi Morojele 45, are reshaping South Africa’s post-apartheid architectural landscape

Marjetica Potrč, 55, artist and architect

Antonio Scarponi, 34, architect

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Fuente: bustler

Harmonia 57

Harmonia 57 by French-Brazilian architects Triptyque is an office building in São Paulo with a planted facade irrigated by a mist system.

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Fuente: dezzen

Plátano Power

Forget China’s 100 medals. The real winner of the Games was…

If you take into account national income - the best guide to Olympic success - the Dominican Republic outperformed us all

Félix Manuel Díaz Guzmán Boxing Gold Medallist

By Chris Dillow

Wasn’t it a great Olympics for Team GB, as I suppose we must call them? Fourth in the medals table - beating the Australians - is a fantastic achievement, isn’t it?

No. There is another league table, published recently by the World Bank, which ranks countries by national income. And this bears a striking resemblance to the medals table. Nine of the top ten countries in the medals table are in the top 15 of the World Bank table; the exception is the Ukraine. Across all 87 countries to have won a medal, the correlation between the medals ranking and the GDP ranking is 0.41 - far higher than you would reasonably expect by accident.

In this respect, the Beijing Olympics were not unusual. In a recent paper Hon-Kwong Lui and Wing Suen, two Chinese economists, showed that population and national income per person were “major determinants” of medals won in Olympics between 1952 and 2004.

The reason for this is trivially simple. The more people a country has, the more chance it has of producing a medallist. And the richer it is, the more able it is to invest in talent-spotting or in training facilities, and the more chance it has of its sports becoming Olympic events; as Matthew Syed pointed out in these pages, sailing gets lots of medals but kabaddi doesn’t.

Big economies should therefore get more medals than small ones. And they do.

This suggests a different way of judging Olympic success. We should compare a nation’s position in the medals table to its position in the GDP table.

On this basis, Britain’s performance was no better than respectable. Our fourth place in the medals table is just one place better than our position in the national income table. The notable fact about British Olympians is their underperformance in previous Games rather than huge outperformance in these.

By this measure, I’m sad to report, the Aussies did better than us. Their sixth position in the medals table is nine places better than their national income ranking. We can, though, take comfort in the fact that Germany - fifth in the medals table - underperformed relative to its economy.

So, who are the winners and losers by this standard? The winner is the Dominican Republic. Its one gold and one silver put it 47th in the medals table, while its puny economy is only the 179th in the world. Mongolia, Zimbabwe and Jamaica also did well.

The loser is Taiwan. It has the 17th biggest economy in the world, but came a mere 79th in the medals table.

There is a pattern here. The countries that punched above their economic weight in these games - which include North Korea, Cuba and Uzbekistan - are in many cases nations not renowned for their peace, political stability or respect for human rights; Jamaica is no place to be if you are a homosexual. Many of the losers have a better record.

This vindicates Harry Lime’s theory. As he said in The Third Man, warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed gave us Michelangelo, da Vinci and the Renaissance while 500 years of democracy and peace in Switzerland (35th in the medals table and 22nd in the GDP table) produced only the cuckoo clock. (Even this was wrong; the cuckoo clock was invented in Germany.)

Excellence in the Olympics, then, is no sign of a wider flourishing of a nation. Gordon Brown might care to consider this before celebrating the British results.

There is an even stronger pattern. The 2008 medals ranking is similar to the 2004 ranking. The correlation between the two is a hefty 0.8. The ranking in the Athens games alone explains, in the statistical sense, three-fifths of the variation in the Beijing rankings. Of the countries to have “medalled” most - including team GB - moved fewer than ten places in the rankings between 2004 and 2008.

In other words, history matters. A nation with a culture of winning medals tends to continue doing so; nations with no such culture find it much harder.

There is a lesson here for anyone running any large organisation. Big groups - nations, firms, government departments - have history, traditions and culture that heavily influence their chances of success or failure. These cannot easily be overridden by the mere will of a leader.

You have probably got an objection to all this. When Chris Hoy sat on his bike on the starting line, he did not look at his rivals and think: “I come from a richer nation than most of those guys; this’ll be a cinch.” Instead, he focused upon giving all he could.

And this is the point. From the point of view of the individual competitor, Olympic success is about skill, training and dedication - and, arguably, perhaps even natural talent. But from the point of view of the nation, success depends upon history and economics.

In other words, overall outcomes are not necessarily merely the result of individual motivations added together. Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please.

Chris Dillow is an economics writer at the Investors Chronicle and blogs at stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com

Fuente: The Times

Kyu Sung Woo Named 2008 Ho-Am Laureate in the Arts

Nerman Museum Of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS (Photo Credit: Copyright Timothy Hursley - The Arkansas Office)

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Fuente: bustler

World Architecture Festival Awards

224 buildings from 43 countries have made it on to the first ever World Architecture Festival Awards shortlist.

Hale County Animal Shelter, Rural Studio, Auburn University, United States of America (Category: CIVIC)

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Casa Lago Rupanco / Beals Arquitectos

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Fuente: Plataforma Arquitectura

XVI Bienal de Arquitectura de Chile

Nombre de la Obra: Hotel Alto Atacama
Localización: San Pedro de Atacama, II Región, Chile
Arquitectos: Carlos Alberto Urzúa Baeza y Francisco Javier Guerrero del Río
Arquitectos colaboradores: Marisol Ibáñez H, María Ignacia Salas Z.

Nombre de la obra y Propietario: Casa Cortina, Andres Santa Cruz
Arquitectos: Labarca, Lyon Arquitectos
Arquitecto Asociado: Juan Eduardo Ojeda
Colaboradora: Alejandra Pérez

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Bronte House, Sidney

Chenchow Little Architects

Fuente: wallpaper*

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Life-Cycle Studies: Candy Bars

The history of candy bars is a quest for ways to produce a more consistent product at lower cost. In 1958, Mars was able to cut the time spent per bar from 16 hours to 35 minutes. Today, precision machines mix, shape, and package bars at a rate of several hundred a minute.

Most candy bars are remarkably alike, yet each brand is carefully formulated for a unique taste and texture. The most common feature is the chocolate coating, which provides flavor and prevents the filling from spoiling or drying out.

Nearly all chocolate comes from tropical countries, where the cacao beans are picked, fermented, and sun-dried before being shipped to factories worldwide. There, they are roasted and winnowed, and the inner nib is crushed, heated, and ground into a thick “liquor” that consists largely of cocoa butter, a vegetable fat. The cocoa butter is mixed with various ingredients, such as sugar, milk, and vanilla, to form different types of chocolate.

The resulting mixture is kneaded between large steel rollers to make a smooth paste, and then “conched,” or heated, mixed, ground, and stirred, to develop its flavor. An enrober is used to shower the liquid chocolate on lines of fillings, such as nougat, wafers, and caramel, most derived from water- and chemical-intensive commodities like corn, flour, and sugar. The bars then are wrapped and shipped to stores via truck or airplane. Once the candy is eaten, the wrapper is simply tossed, ending up in landfills or the open environment.

Doing It Better

Concerns about the use of child labor have sparked ambitious efforts to regulate chocolate production. The 2001 Harkin-Engel protocol aims to ensure that half the cocoa originating in West Africa, a leading producer, is free of exploitative child labor by July 2008. In general, the trend is toward “gourmet” products, including items that are handmade, made with local and organic ingredients, and fairly traded. The organic chocolate market is growing by more than 50 percent annually, and Mars, Hershey, and other candy makers are developing “artisan” brands.

http://www.worldwatch.org/node/5691#mce_temp_url#

El PE(d)O de la vaca

by Lisa Zyga

Researchers from Argentina were surprised to find that a single 550-kg cow produces between 800 to 1,000 liters of emissions each day. (Reuters)

(PhysOrg.com) — In an attempt to understand the extent of cow flatulence on global warming, scientists in Argentina are strapping plastic bags to the backs of cows to capture their emissions.

Argentina has more than 55 million cows, making it a leading producer of beef. In the study, the scientists were surprised to discover that a standard 550-kg cow produces between 800 to 1,000 liters of emissions, including methane, each day.

Further, methane - which is also released from landfills, coal mines and leaking gas pipes - is 23 times more effective than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere.

“When we got the first results, we were surprised,” said Guillermo Berra, a researcher at the National Institute of Agricultural Technology in Argentina. “Thirty percent of Argentina´s (total greenhouse) emissions could be generated by cattle.”

In their study, the researchers attached balloon-like plastic packs to the backs of at least 10 cows. A tube running to the animals´ stomachs collected the gas inside the backpacks, which were then hung from the roof of the corral for analysis.

The Argentine researchers say that the slow digestive system of the cows causes them to produce these large amounts of methane. Now, the scientists are performing trials of new diets designed to improve the cows´ digestion and reduce global warming. By feeding cows clover and alfalfa instead of grain, “you can reduce methane emissions by 25 percent,” according to Silvia Valtorta of the National Council of Scientific and Technical Investigations.

Fuente: PHYSORG

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