Planet Green's top 5 eco TEDTalks

Planet Green's top 5 eco TEDTalks: "

The US cable channel Planet Green counts down their five favorite eco TEDTalks -- with some great big visions to save the planet and the people on it. Some old favorites and some you might have missed. Watch the short video roundup linked above, and watch Planet Green's five top eco TEDTalks right here:

Paul Stamets on 6 ways mushrooms can save the world >>

Chris Jordan pictures some shocking stats >>

Jamie Oliver's TED Prize wish: Teach every child about food >>

Al Gore on averting climate crisis >>

Michael Pritchard's water filter turns filthy water drinkable >>

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Speaker lineup for TEDGlobal 2010

Speaker lineup for TEDGlobal 2010: "

Today, the TEDGlobal 2010 team has unveiled the lineup of more than 50 speakers and performers for TEDGlobal 2010, to be held July 12-16 in Oxford, England.

Speakers range from brain scientist Sebastian Seung to novelist Elif Shafak ... from wildlife biologist Toni Frohoff to education researcher Sugata Mitra ... Musicians include Annie Lennox, Thomas Dolby and young stars Karsu Dönmez and Mor Karbasi. They'll all be part of a fast-paced, highly curated three-day stage program featuring TED's famous 18-minute talks, plus music, comedy, dance, short talks, video interludes and other surprises.

Twenty-three young TEDGlobal Fellows will be joining the 700 attendees in Oxford.

Browse the TEDGlobal 2010 speaker lineup (Flash) >>

See a list of all speakers and performers A to Z (no Flash) >>

Registration for TEDGlobal 2010 has closed; you can watch a live webstream of TEDGlobal 2010 through our Associates membership program. Learn more >>

Watch the TEDGlobal preview video >>

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How Many People Are Moving to (and Away From) Dallas?

How Many People Are Moving to (and Away From) Dallas?: "

Forbes has a cool tool on its site for viewing IRS data that shows how many people are moving to and away from a county. The lines in red show people moving out of Dallas County; black represent people moving in. You can click any county in the country and see how its doing. (h/t Walkable DFW)

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Frank Gehry Defends His Criticism of LEED

Frank Gehry Defends His Criticism of LEED: "

A few months ago, legendary American architect Frank Gehry ruffled many green feathers by declaring that green architecture and sustainable design are “political” and that LEED certification is often given for “bogus stuff”. His comments, unsurprisingly, provoked quite a reaction in the world of sustainable design — especially when he told Bloomberg Businessweek that green building had become “fetishized” like “wearing an American flag pin”. This week, Need to Know, a new current affairs show and online news magazine on PBS, sat down with Frank Gehry to speak to him about the LEED controversy and ask what he “really thinks about green building, the LEED certification process and the future of sustainable architecture”.

Read the rest of Frank Gehry Defends His Criticism of LEEDhttp://www.inhabitat.com/wp-admin/ohttp://www.inhabitat.com/wp-admin/options-general.php?page=better_feedptions-general.php?page=better_feed

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Reverse Graffiti Hits the Streets of Porto Alegre, Brazil

Reverse Graffiti Hits the Streets of Porto Alegre, Brazil: "

Click here to view the embedded video.

Reverse graffiti — removing paint or dirt from a wall to create a pattern — is a hot trend internationally, and many cities have had a hard time figuring out how to handle it legally. Inhabitat reader Aislan pointed us to this cool video of graffiti artists removing exhaust on the tunnel walls to write “For a Clean Porto Alegre.” Police show up, hear the invisible inkers make their case, and end up shielding them from traffic while they work!

Read the rest of Reverse Graffiti Hits the Streets of Porto Alegre, Brazilhttp://www.inhabitat.com/wp-admin/ohttp://www.inhabitat.com/wp-admin/options-general.php?page=better_feedptions-general.php?page=better_feed

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The Genius Behind Minority Report's Interfaces Resurfaces, With Mind-blowing New Tech

The Genius Behind Minority Report's Interfaces Resurfaces, With Mind-blowing New Tech: "

You have to watch this video, to appreciate how fast gestural interfaces are developing.

 It's a cliche to say that Minority Report-style interfaces are just around the corner. But not when John Underkoffler is involved. As tech advistor on the film, he was the guy whose work actually inspired the interfaces that Tom Cruise used. The real-life system he's been developing, called g-speak, is unbelievable.

We've previously covered Underkoffler and his start-up, Oblong, but in February, he unveiled his latest work at TED. The video was just recently put online. And. It. Will. Blow. Your. Mind.

The video is 15 minute long, but fast forward to 6:30 if you want to zip straight to the trippy stuff. [youtube b6YTQJVzwlI]

Oblong hasn't previously revealed most of the features you see in the later half of the video, including the ability zoom in and fly through a virtual, 3-D image environment (6:30); the ability to navigate a SQL database in 3-D (8:40); the gestural wand that lets you manipulate and disassemble 3-D models (10:00); and the stunning movie-editing system, called Tamper (11:00).

Underkoffler thinks these gestural systems--which offer far more robustness than Microsoft's Project Natal or PlayStation's Move--are five years from being commonplace. And he thinks they're not only cool, but necessary: 'Much of what we want computers to help us with is spatail,' he says. And much of what computers do is easiest to understand and navigate if we tap a visual system we've spent millions of years evolving.

Oblong, for its part, is making these things real: That SQL database is a logistics application you can easily see being gobbled up by supply-chain planners.

"

Big Ideas Stuffed Into Small Buildings at the Victoria & Albert

Big Ideas Stuffed Into Small Buildings at the Victoria & Albert: "

From a Mumbai hovel to a Rural Studio woodshed, it's real, live architecture at the V&A.

Architecture
is a tricky thing to convey in museums, because it's usually resigned to photos,
blueprints, and weird little models. Which can be about as
interesting as watching paint dry. So London's Victoria & Albert asked architects to throw up
structures in the museum itself. The result: 1:1 - Architects Build Small Spaces
displays seven real, live mini-buildings that, as the press materials
tell us, 'push the boundaries and possibilities of creative practice.'

The theme is refuges. That's obvious enough in Sou Fujimoto Architects's acrylic cube (top), an abstraction of a tree that looks like a giant princess-cut diamond, and one of Terunobu Fujimori's whimsical teahouses (an old example below, and then video of the new project being built).

[vimeo 12393513]

Helen
& Hard Architects axed ash trees from a forest
in their native Norway to make this exuberant pavilion, which
references both Norse folklore and British garden folly from the 18th
century (back in those quaint, pre-InterWeb times when putting odd crap in your backyard counted as high entertainment).

Not
everything's a refuge in the strict sense of the word, this being
architecture about 'pushing boundaries and possibilities.' Consider the contribution from Studio Mumbai Architects. It's the cast of a sliver of a hovel
that's tucked into a narrow corridor behind the firm's offices and
peopled by a family of eight. Sounds more like a domestic war zone than a
sanctuary, but according to the project description, unauthorized dwellings
of this sort 'offer intelligent design solutions' in a place, where
scarce land and skyrocketing real estate prices conspire against the
city's poorest residents. 'As well as shelter, they provide spaces
for refuge, contemplation and worship,' we're told.

Representing
Team America is Rural Studio, the Auburn U architecture
program that lets schlubby college students cobble together buildings in
the backwoods of Alabama. Here, they built a woodshed that would only
look like a refuge in, well, the backwoods of Alabama.

Whatever, there's a cool idea at play. The
shed's made of thinnings, the smallest, weakest trees in a forest,
razed to let stronger trees thrive. They're a key, if
non-intuitive, hallmark of sustainable forestry management, and they have
some promising applications in architecture. This pavilion will host
improv jazz sessions. So you can watch woodshedding in the woodshed.
Get it?We're refreshed
to see actual buildings in an exhibit about buildings (even though it isn't the first to do so). For diehard architecture
nerds, it's a refuge own right.1:1 - Architects Build Small Spaces
opens tomorrow.

"

Ingenious Flipper Bridge Melds Left-Side Drivers With Right-Side Drivers

Ingenious Flipper Bridge Melds Left-Side Drivers With Right-Side Drivers: "

Hong Kong drives on the left side of the road, mainland China on the right. So how do you prevent crashes when driving between them?

One of the most vexing aspects of traveling between mainland China and
Hong Kong is the car travel: People in the former drive on the right
side of the road; people in the latter drive on the left (a vestige of the British empire).

So to quell
confusion at the border and, more importantly, to keep cars from
smashing into each other, the Dutch firm NL Architects proposed a brilliant, simple solution, the Flipper bridge.

The bridge does exactly what the name suggests: It flips traffic
around. The key here is separating the two sides of traffic, using a figure-eight shape. One side of the road dips under
the other, funneling cars that were traveling on the left to the
right (and vice versa), without forcing them to encounter head-on traffic at an intersection. The bridge
makes what should be a disorienting switch exquisitely easy. Check out
PixelActive's 3D model of the traffic flow
below: [youtube BwpqU3lRfMo]

Say, for instance, you're coming from Zhuhai. As you cross the
bridge on the right into Hong Kong, the highway slopes downward to let
you pass under the oncoming traffic. As it slopes back up, you reemerge
on the left. No cars barreling straight at you. No concrete labyrinth
to maneuver through. No sweat (and, ostensibly, no blood).

The bridge is part of a master plan NL Architects floated for an ideas
competition on the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge, a complex of bridges and
tunnels connecting the west side of Hong Kong to mainland China and
Macau. (As clever as their idea was, NL Architects, alas, didn't prevail;
first prize in the professional category went to a proposal called
'Under One Roof' that unctuously billed itself as 'China, Macau and
Hong Kong as one big family,' all but ensuring a win.)

In some ways, though, perhaps the Flipper bridge may be too good of an idea. One of the great paradoxes of driving, as Tom Vanderbilt highlights in his terrific book Traffic, is
that dangerous roads are actually safer precisely because they're
perceived as dangerous; that is, they make drivers more vigilant and
therefore less likely to get into a collision. (Which explains the
seemingly inexplicable appeal of European roundabouts.)

In 1967,
Sweden switched over to right-side driving, after years on the left, and everyone steeled themselves for a spike in accidents. Instead, incidents plummeted. Facing apparent peril, people became more cautious behind the wheel (and others probably stayed off the road altogether).

Sure, the Flipper bridge
seems like a fail-safe idea. But what if a driver, lulled by the easy left-right transition, forgot that the change over had even been made? You can bet a horrifying accident would result. Sometimes, a little danger is a good
thing.

"

Of Rice and Yen: An Englishman’s look at the best and worst of Japan

Of Rice and Yen: An Englishman’s look at the best and worst of Japan: "

Of Rice and Yen: An Englishman’s look at the best and worst of Japan; the pleasures and pains, the gems and the jaw-droppers

by Dave Mosley

Of Rice and Yen is a book on Japanese society, people, and culture with a refreshing difference. A truly honest and balanced account of the country, it covers not only the good aspects of Japanese society but, uniquely, provides a concise and critical account of the worst bits as well.

Forty carefully selected topics, twenty positive and twenty negative, paint a personalized and demystified account of the country in an entertaining, at times witty, and always revealing manner. From men with steel balls to waitresses with no pants, from electric baths to squirting toilets, and from golden turds to exquisite cuisine, this book has it all in a straight-punching account of Japan in all its naked splendour.

For the Japan-curious, this book provides an insight that will entertain and enchant. For the visitor or foreign resident, this book details the aspects of life that will be adored and abhorred; an account to bring the tired guidebook statistics to life.

Click on the link below to start downloading this free ebook:-

Of Rice and Yen: An Englishman’s look at the best and worst of Japan; the pleasures and pains, the gems and the jaw-droppers – 252 pages, 5.2Mb (PDF)

"

First, do no harm

First, do no harm: "

The best way to make hospitals green is to keep people out of them

IN JANUARY the National Health Service (NHS) in England calculated its carbon footprint as the equivalent of 21m tonnes of carbon dioxide a year—just short of the amount emitted by the Drax coal-fired power station in Yorkshire, western Europe’s largest. Unlike the power station’s emissions, though, those of the health service have been increasing: they have grown by half since 1990. Other countries fare no better. A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association estimates that America’s health-care industry accounts for 8% of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions. In Germany, a study by the Viamedica Foundation showed that a hospital’s energy expenditure per bed was roughly the same as that of three newly built homes.

The past few years have seen efforts to make things greener. The King Edward Memorial hospital in Mumbai, for example, was recently remodelled with solar heaters and rainwater-collection units. Many hospitals are switching from standard light-bulbs to compact fluorescent or LED lights. The Dell Children’s Medical Center in Austin, Texas, was the first hospital to be certified “platinum” under the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) standards of the United States’ Green Building Council—the highest designation there is. ...

"

Cleveland's Galleria Mall Turns Lost Retail Space Into Greenhouse Farm Stand

Cleveland's Galleria Mall Turns Lost Retail Space Into Greenhouse Farm Stand: "

Shopping malls, those bastions of American consumerism, have not been immune to the recent economic downturn. In a recent piece by our own Greg Lindsay, we looked at the impending decline of the mall, which is part of the 'single-use environment' category of real estate development that will slowly disappear over the next thirty years, according to one developer. But what will replace these environments, and more importantly, what will happen to the massive malls of today?

One possible solution can be seen in Cleveland's Galleria mall. The mall lost many of its retail shops over the past few years, leaving gaping holes in the greenhouse-like space. So employees of the Galleria came up with the idea for the Gardens Under Glass project, a so-called urban ecovillage inside the mall that features carts of fruits and vegetables grown on-site. The project was recently given a $30,000 start-up grant from Cleveland's Civic Innovation Lab.

The Cleveland Plain Dealer explains:

Poole and Hamilton put in the first green stuff this week--a 12-foot cart of lettuce and other greens near the Galleria's first-floor escalators. Their aim is to start an education center and store in a former candy shop, invite sustainable-product makers to display and sell their items, and sell produce to restaurants and individuals. They dream of hosting school groups and teams of volunteer urban gardeners eager to work beds of herbs and greens and vine systems raised hydroponically, aquaponically and in organic soils.

We can see it now: the malls of today turned into the suburban (and urban) farming powerhouses of tomorrow. And while we're at it, why not turn entire economically depressed cities into agricultural centers as well? It's already happening in Detroit, where entrepreneurs are turning vacant lots into factory-side farms. And if Cleveland's mall farm works out, maybe New Jersey can become the next big agricultural innovator--the state has the most malls per square mile in the country.

[Via Cleveland Plain Dealer]

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TEDTalks : Joshua Prince-Ramus: Building a theater that remakes itself - Joshua Prince-Ramus (2009)

TEDTalks : Joshua Prince-Ramus: Building a theater that remakes itself - Joshua Prince-Ramus (2009): "Joshua Prince-Ramus believes that if architects re-engineer their design process, the results can be spectacular. Speaking at TEDxSMU, Dallas, he walks us through his fantastic re-creation of the local Wyly Theater as a giant 'theatrical machine' that reconfigures itself at the touch of a button."

TEDTalks : Charles Fleischer insists: All things are Moleeds - Charles Fleischer (2005)

TEDTalks : Charles Fleischer insists: All things are Moleeds - Charles Fleischer (2005): "In a presentation that can only be described as epic, comedian Charles Fleischer delivers a hysterical send-up of a time-honored TED theme: the map. Geometry, numbers, charts and stamp art also factor in (somehow), as he weaves together a unique theory of everything called 'Moleeds.'"