Welcome to Vol. 8 No. 11 of Design Science News, the e-bulletin of the Buckminster Fuller Institute
Design Science News brings you news from around the world related to humanity’s option for success and comprehensive design science. It also features updates from BFI and periodic special offers for our members.Janine Benyus and Hunter Lovins join the Buckminster Fuller Challenge jury!
We are thrilled to announce that Janine Benyus and Hunter Lovins have joined the jury for the first Buckminster Fuller Challenge!
Benyus and Lovins, together with the five other members of the jury announced previously, will select the winner of the first Challenge, to be announced in June 2008 at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City.
To read the full press release, please visit the Challenge website.
BFI Network membership renewal campaign underway
We would like to invite the readers of Design Science News to become contributing members of the BFI Network. BFI has a momentous year ahead of us in 2008 with the first Buckminster Fuller Challenge prize to be conferred in June, the opening of the Whitney Museum’s retrospective on Fuller, and a number of other exciting opportunities. There has never been a more exciting time to become a supporting member and get involved!
To those of you who join or renew at the Association Level ($100) or above before December 21st, we are offering a special gift of the 1970 edition of Fuller’s classic book of essays No More Secondhand God (now out of print).
Learn more about joining the BFI network
Join the network today!
Fuller’s Baton Rouge, LA dome demolished by owner Kansas City Southern Railroad
Outrage, anger, grief, and dismay were expressed by Louisiana preservation leaders when they awoke on Tuesday to personal accounts of the demolition of one of the state’s and the nation’s most significant architectural structures, a Buckminster Fuller Geodesic Dome, located in the northern section of East Baton Rouge Parish. The dome was demolished by the owner, Kansas City Southern Railroad, Nov. 15 when KCS obtained permits to demolish the building. The structure was known as the Union Tank Car Geodesic Dome and fondly as Baton Rouge’s “Bucky Dome.”
The structure, designed and constructed in 1958, has been on the Foundation for Historical Louisiana’s recent “Treasures in Trouble” preservation advocacy list for the capital region and the Louisiana Trust’s Top 10 Endangered State Properties list, said Lenore Feeney, Foundation Chair.
“I thought we were beyond destroying historical buildings when no one is looking,” said Foundation for Historical Louisiana (FHL) Executive Director Carolyn Bennett. The dome was eminently eligible for listing on the National Register of Historic Places and would have been eligible for historic preservation tax credits and Go Zone funding. “The Dome is gone. I was there this morning as day broke. How can I express my contempt for the Kansas City Southern Railway? There are no words strong enough. They certainly expressed their contempt for our community in the destruction of, certainly, the most important structure in Baton Rouge, and possibly the State,” said preservationist Ward Bond, a devotee of Buckminster Fuller’s work and an advocate for the dome’s reuse for decades.
BFI.org Community Content posting about the dome’s demolition
Visit the website of the Foundation for Historical Louisiana
HOLIDAY SALE: Spaceship Earth Satellite Map $15.95
With a resolution of 1 km per pixel, this map has been specially produced to more accurately match the true colors of the Earth. The Spaceship Earth Satellite map combines the latest in natural color satellite photograph technology with the accuracy of the Fuller Projection to create a truly stunning, cloud-free image of our world using richly colored blues, greens and ambers. Created in collaboration with Jim Knighton of Clear Light Products. Presented against a black background, printed on 25 inch x 38 inch heavy-gauge recycled paper. Order your copy today!
TRENDS & PERSPECTIVES
Study details how U.S. could cut 28% of greenhouse gases
The United States could shave as much as 28 percent off the amount of greenhouse gases it emits at fairly modest cost and with only small technology innovations, according to a new report.
A large share of the reductions could come from steps that would more than pay for themselves in lower energy bills for industries and individual consumers, the report said, adding that people should take those steps out of good sense regardless of how worried they might be about climate change. But that is unlikely to happen under present circumstances, said the authors, who are energy experts at McKinsey & Company, the consulting firm.
The report said the country was brimming with “negative cost opportunities” - potential changes in the lighting, heating and cooling of buildings, for example, that would reduce carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels even as they save money. “These types of savings have been around for 20 years,” said Jack Stephenson, a director of the study. (Source: The New York Times)
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/30/business/30green.html?ref=science
Yahoo! unleashes teraflops of processing power for research
A given in the world of information technology is that the amount of data is only going to grow over time. But how can academics and computer scientists make sense of the mountains of information - whether astronomic calculations from a distant satellite or a study of Internet traffic - if they do not have access to a computer capable of handling such large loads?
Yahoo!, Inc., this week offered its vast computing resources to assist with academic pursuits that require a massively parallel computing environment. Parallel computing involves breaking down extremely large sets of data and distributing them to different interconnected computers for simultaneous processing and analysis. Yahoo is offering the service via a cluster of 4,000 computer processors it refers to as M45 running software, also known as Hadoop, an open-source distributed file system and parallel execution environment that lets its users process massive amounts of data.
There is a demand for the ability to extract meaningful information from tremendous amounts of data gathered by computer systems across a number of different disciplines, says Randal Bryant, dean of Carnegie Mellon University’s (C.M.U.) School of Computer Science in Pittsburgh.
C.M.U. this month became the first academic institution to sign up for time on Yahoo!’s M45 supercomputer cluster. Initially, about 20 of the school’s researchers will use M45 to study ways to improve information retrieval, large-scale graph and computer graphics, natural-language processing and machine translation on widely distributed systems. Yahoo! also plans to make M45 available to researchers from other universities and institutions. (Source: Scientific American)
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=yahoo-supercomputer-google-open-source
Prospectors claim stretches of ocean, hoping to harness wave energy
A new California “gold rush” is on - to stake out claims to prime stretches of ocean along the coast where prospectors hope to harness waves to produce energy.
No one’s succeeded in producing wave power commercially in the United States, but the lure of future feasibility as a clean source of energy is spurring potential developers to claim prime wave sites.
The latest entrant is Sonoma County, which is seeking to snare what would be the largest zone of coastal seawater ever reserved for wave energy on the West Coast.
The Sonoma County Water Agency plans this week to ask federal regulators for exclusive rights to study and develop wave-energy technology along the entire 41-mile county coastline, extending 12 miles out to sea, an expanse of about 490 square miles, said agency spokesman Cordel Stillman. The permit application to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission follows a supervisors’ vote approving the move Tuesday.
The holder of a FERC permit has exclusive rights to the claimed zone for three years for study and testing of the technology, and then may apply for a license to operate commercially. No operating licenses have been granted in the United States, and only one license application is pending - off the coast of Washington. (Source: The San Francisco Gate)
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/11/12/MNNPT8U6A.DTL
RESOURCES
Math Trek: A video worth a million words
Abstraction lies at the heart of mathematics. It makes math powerful, but at the same time, it can make math hard to understand. Abstraction makes math simultaneously beautiful and austere, useful and esoteric.
But a picture can tame the mad monster of abstraction, and sometimes, a video can do so even better. Now, a pair of mathematicians has created a video that shows how to visualize and understand Möbius transformations, which are a fundamental and highly abstract mathematical tool. The new video, “Möbius Transformations Revealed,” has become an Internet sensation, with 60,000 hits on YouTube so far. It also won honorable mention in the Science 2007 Science and Engineering Visualization challenge.
Check out the video
The Biomimicry Institute launches certificate program
The Biomimicry Institute in cooperation with The Biomimicry Guild has opened applications for the new Certificate in Biomimicry, a two-year, non-residential program that will begin May 2008. The program is designed to give attendees the skills necessary to become practicing biomimics. The course will be taught by a suite of experts, led by Dr. Dayna Baumeister, co-founder of the Biomimicry Guild, in the fields of biomimicry and sustainability with several guest lectures by prominent, world-renowned visionaries in the fields of sustainability, green business, green chemistry, ecological design, and more. Applications are due December 21, 2007. We invite you to learn more and download applications at: http://biomimicryinstitute.org/education/certificate/
Special thanks to Deborah Grace Kraft for bringing this opportunity to our attention.
EVENTS
OpenEco Energy Camp 2008
Start making a difference today and register to attend OpenEco Energy Camp, an event designed to inspire you to make positive environmental changes at work and at home.
What: OpenEco Energy Camp
When: Thursday, January 10, 2008, opening session starts at 10:00 am
Where: Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco, CA
Cost: Free
Who will be there?
Recognized business and ecology leaders, talented open source developers focused on positive environmental impact and all those important people you see on TV who talk about the effects of climate change and you wish you knew.
Who should attend?
If you’ve ever come into your office in the morning and realized someone left the lights on overnight but didn’t think twice about it, this conference is for you. Or if you are a developer and you’ve always wanted to put your coding skills to use for the greater good. Actions as simple as purchasing CFL bulbs for your office or contributing code to an open source carbon footprint community can turn you into an Undercover Planet-Saving Superstar (cape not included).
What will the event be like?
OpenEco Energy Camp will be an unconference style event, which means you and your fellow participants will set the agenda for the day. We’ll provide you with access to environmental leaders, creative tools to help spark your ideas, food and eco-minded colleagues, but the real conversations of the day will be led by you. An unconference gives you the best parts of a typical conference (the coffee breaks, the water cooler conversations, the film screenings and the networking) and provides you with the freedom to explore these connections in more detail without the hassle of a tedious, time-driven agenda.
To register, and for more information about the event, visit: http://openeco.org/energycamp/
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